This morning on Fox News Sunday, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson said "Governors should lead the Democratic Party." He used the election of Tim Kaine in Virginia where he won among women and suburbanites and African Americans and Latinos by campaigning on issues they care about and talking directly about his faith as the evidence for the Governors leading.
I wrote a very similar article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution after the elections last year. There are Democrats who are winning in the states, perhaps they should have more say than those Democrats who spend most of their time in Washington. The director's cut of that article is below as reprinted on www.ChangetheParty.com.
Maybe They're Just Not That Into Us
It's Time for the Red Dogs to Lead the National Democratic Party
By Jamal Simmons
Since Election Day, I have been on the receiving end of e-mail tirades from friends threatening to leave America, jokes about seceding from "Jesus-land", and reveling in columns from European newspapers denigrating the 58 million Americans who voted for Republicans last week. The common cry is to blast those who voted Republican as Neanderthal "Jesus freaks" intent on extinguishing the glow of enlightenment shining from the urban centers on both coasts.
If only we could educate them, some bemoan...
Let's have teach-ins to school them, others suggest!
As a former press secretary for several southern Democratic candidates, I have come to believe that communication is not really our problem. Maybe the people who live in the vast sea of red that stretches from North Carolina to Nevada and North Dakota to Florida understand the intellectual and cultural elites who denigrate their towns as "fly-over country" perfectly. To adapt the title of a popular book about relationships, maybe "They're Just Not That Into Us."
As a Martha's Vineyard-vacationing, Ivy League graduate, seemingly I should laugh along at the empty threats of investment banker liberals to take their rugby balls and skulk home to Europe, but instead, this mass denunciation of Middle America just infuriates me. Perhaps as an African-American with an ever-present sense of being the "other" I recoil at the stereotyping. Or maybe it's the responsibility I feel to family members and childhood friends from the rural south and the inner city of Detroit who consistently vote for Democrats to help them and protect them even as we lose election after election.
Or it could be that working on campaigns in Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, and Arkansas over the last four years has given me some perspective on the intellectual incongruence of my chardonnay-sipping friends who are despondent about the Bible-reading voters who support Republicans, yet enthusiastically support white Democrats showing up in black churches every Sunday before an election.
It is time for the Northeastern and West Coast-based Democratic establishment to open up and invite our brothers and sisters from red state America who are winning races to sit with labor leaders, trial lawyers, civil rights groups and environmentalists and tell us how to win out there. We have strangled the Yellow Dog Democrats in Congress until they became blue in the face. Maybe the time is ripe to welcome the rise of these Red Dog Democrats, who have been loyal to their party while winning contests in states that have been painted red in national elections.
We need to acknowledge that red states are not filled with backward-looking "religious nuts," but instead with people who share our desire for equal treatment under the law and a secure future for their children. They want to be safe from the threat of terrorists, feel a little more financially secure and have a government that does not monitor their every action. For all the blue state rhetoric, it is the red states of Arizona, New Mexico, Arkansas, Louisiana, Colorado, and Kansas that currently have at least one minority or female Democratic governor or U.S. Senator. If you include female Republicans add the red states of Utah, Texas, North Carolina, and Alaska. Yet, there are neither women nor minorities in those state-wide offices in the blue states of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Those allegedly enlightened states all voted for Kerry. In fact, the Massachusetts delegation doesn't even have one woman or minority member of Congress anymore!
Many liberals have started down the dangerous path of denial and are arguing that the losses in this election weren't really so bad. The numbers may bear out that switching a few thousand votes here and there would have assured John Kerry an electoral victory, but I would urge my Democratic brethren to use this opportunity to take a longer view. The reality is this: the majority of Americans have voted for someone other than the Democratic nominee for president in every election since 1976. We have lost the majority of U.S. House seats in the last six elections and the majority of U.S. Senate seats in five of the last six elections. Most people involved in state-wide campaigns outside of the Northeast and West Coast will tell you that more often our candidates win despite being Democrats, not because of it. The Democratic label has become an albatross around the neck of many candidates who are forced into a two-step of disassociating themselves from the give-no-inch secularism and wobbly security stance of the national party, while supporting its progressive economic policies and calls for inclusion.
Many people outside of urban America are anxious about turning over the protection of our country to people who openly display disdain for them. They eye warily a popular culture that reviles the symbols they hold dear like public displays of faith, protecting the flag, and owning guns. Perhaps they view the challenges to those symbols as attacks by people who do not seem to respect them or their opinions and are so offended by them that they would rather vote against their own economic self-interest than align themselves with their attackers. We've all had a couple of weeks to attack the red states, now it's time to start listening to them.