Speaking for myself only, I have been active in Democratic politics since 1964, and I am done with these bastards.
I have been a precinct committeeman, a Congressional district and state party committeeman, and county party chairman. I have knocked on a lot of doors for Democratic candidates. I have telephoned a lot of voters for Democratic candidates, or for the Democratic ticket generally. I have registered a lot of Democrats. I have driven a lot of Democrats to the polls. I have been a state party political director. I have personally managed a great many successful start-up campaigns.
My wife has been —if anything— more active than I have.
She has given twice as much grunt-work and leadership as I have given. And together we have given a lot of money to Democratic candidates (and raised a ton of money for Democratic candidates), including several thousand dollars in the last two cycles.
HUAC (the House Unamerican Activities Committee) coughed out some of its last gasps hounding the leaders of the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) to their graves. NCNP was one of the boldest ventures of the 1960’s left, joining the Old Left and rising radicals from the New Left in Chicago from Aug. 31 - Sept. 1, 1967. HUAC did not succeed in hounding my wife to her grave. To make herself “findable” she got herself elected to the Democratic National Committee in 1980. She remained on the DNC until 1988.
In fact she attended every Democratic National Convention that nominated a loser between Adlai Stevenson and John Kerry. She did not attend the Kerry convention, just in hopes that her personal convention juju alone wouldn’t cost him the Presidency.
History remembers H. Rap Brown as Justice Minister of the Black Panther Party. He is perhaps most famous for his proclamation during that period that "violence is as American as cherry pie", as well as once stating that "If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down." Brown is currently serving a life sentence for a homicide committed in 2000. But Brown was just one of many dissident leaders at NCNP. And NCNP asked my wife to serve at Sergeant at Arms. For decades I have told people who want to know me better to just know that I have spent the last several decades blissfully married to a woman who told H. Rap Brown to “sit down, and shut up.” And while that may have happened any number of times, when my wife told him to sit down and shut up, he did.
Mumbling “you’re pretty little to be pushing people around” H. Rap Brown sat down.
My wife was an ally of Michael Harrington (The Other America) on the DNC. Harrington introduced her to Olof Palme, François Mitterrand, Felipe González Márquez, Willy Brandt, and many other world leaders. And, of course, she knew U.S. Presidents Carter and Clinton, who once slipped her a scrap of paper with a Little Rock address and telephone number hand-written on it.
But of all the important folks my wife has met, I have always empathized most closely with Brown. Who knows whether he ever would have taken the bad turn that he admittedly took, if she hadn’t humiliated him like that?
I guess the reason for this rambling essay, is that I am furious at President Obama, and now —at last— furious enough to leave Democrats to their own devices. If my wife dies, and I feel the cuts to Medicare hastened her death (very highly likely, given her medical fragility), Democrats will come to wish I had continued leaving them to their own devices.
I well recognize the racism that has driven opposition to President Obama. To his critics (as least “his critics” as that group of people was constituted until today) it has been all about Obama’s Kenyan father.
But I know what I know.
We are dealing with a man who cannot but see the world through the untrustworthy eyes of the old (white) Kansas man who raised him.
One sorry son of a bitch.