Pulling weeds

The beautiful Wyoming prairie has a big fat weed needing to be pulled. John Millin is precisely the kind of guy who should never be allowed to speak for the Democratic Party. The Wyoming Democratic Party Chair wrote an inexplicable letter to the Denver (yes, it's in Colorado) Post this week. Referring to Sen. Hillary Clinton, Millin said,

"Every Democratic candidate in Wyoming will be painted with that same liberal, big-government brush. We will also be the target of the locker room jokes that rightfully belong to Bill Clinton," John Millin wrote in a letter to The Denver Post.

Now I've been very careful this year to avoid taking sides in the presidential primary. With the amazing crop of candidates we have, I'm convinced that whoever we nominate will win the General Election and be an excellent president. Colorado Chair Pat Waak has also been careful to stay neutral. This is smart.

In one quick letter Millin committed five fatal errors, any of which should have the Wyoming Central Committee looking for a replacement for their embarrassing geographically-challenged Chair:

• He announced that he is not willing to support a person who has a reasonably good chance of becoming the party nominee. This is not strictly a violation of the rules, unless he decides to actively support the Republican nominee. But from here on Millin is a member of one candidate's campaign and not a leader of the Party as a whole.
• He alienated a majority of his volunteers. By aligning himself with one candidate and bad-mouthing another, he positions himself as an antagonist to most of the active volunteers who support other candidates. He will be powerless to bring the party back together after the primaries.
• He attempted to sabotage not only the Clinton campaign, but every Democratic campaign by using right-wing framing to repeat a Limbaugh lie ("big-government") about Democratic presidents. As anyone who can add two and two should know by now, of all the presidents in US history, the two who are most responsible for the growth of government during their terms are both Republicans, Reagan and Bush Jr.
• He reinforced a right-wing slander on the most recent, highly successful Democratic president, Bill Clinton. By suggesting that "locker room jokes" have any meaningful impact on who should be elected president, he denies the Democratic philosophy that issues and results are what matter.
• Apparently not content to sow discord just in his own state, he sent a letter to a major newspaper in our state to try to try to create divisions here.

Even as a campaign operative, Millin is incompetent. How many Democratic votes can he hope to win, by repeating Republican talking points that have already been soundly rejected by his target audience? The only purpose his comments can serve is to energize the campaign he's trying to harm. I hope he kept his day job.

Now replacing a State Party Chair is not the easiest thing in the world. It's a thankless pay-less job and anyone who would take it deserves a great deal of appreciation. A State Party Chair can be a great asset, a source of Party growth, as has happened in Colorado. Or he can be an obstacle and source of dysfunction, as Millin now must be.

It must be frustrating to be a County Chair today in Wyoming. Their leader doesn't understand his job, and his lack of horsesense threatens all the work they have been doing at the county level. The Democratic Party is home to a diversity of viewpoints, and a Chairperson has to be leader for all of them. A State Chair's job is to build a sense of unity and strength from diversity. Most Chairpeople understand the job, work hard at it, and are good at it. But even in the best garden you get an occasional weed.

All I can say to the Wyoming Democratic Central Committee, as a word of advice from past experience of other states, is don't delay the inevitable. It will only get worse. John Millin obviously doesn't deserve or want to be Chair of the entire Wyoming Democratic Party. Put him out of his misery, now.

Comments

[pdt]

Oddly enough, today I received not one, but two, letters from the Republican National Committee, pleading with me to "stop Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama", and using almost the identical language that Millin used, to attack both candidates. My wife received one, too. I love to see the RNC waste their money sending fund-raising appeals to Democratic Chairpeople, but I wonder if maybe John Millin is reading too much of this junk.

[pdt]

Here's a link to the full letter from Millin: http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2007/1213/20071213_043600_WyoDem.pdf