This is from a comment made by Steve Newton last night in the John Carney thread, and it is a damn fine question. He lays out the state of the board pretty well and takes more time to ask something I’ve been asking here for awhile — if we’re a Blue State, how come we don’t have representation that represents that? Mostly the answer I get back is some testy version of needing more blogging or some such, but blogging is not voting or organizing really — the reach is much too limited.
I am going to object to Steve’s representation of Matt Denn here as “hiding out” for the past 5 years. He’s certainly out and about in the usual Delaware politician way, but he’s been involved with promoting foster parenting for special needs kids, he’s running a Small Business Task force, ran the Justice Reinvestment Task Force and was tapped to help fix the Workman’s Comp problem since KWS wasn’t capable of it. I’m sure I’m missing something that he’s working on, but for a job that has fairly limited duties, I do think that he’s been using his time to work on issues that are important to him.
So what do you think Democrats? How do you look at this field and change it to represent you and your neighbors alot better than this?
Here’s the issue for Delaware Democrats
You have a Congressman who doesn’t vote for Democratic issues, and yet who is basically invulnerable to a primary challenge.
You have an Attorney General who won’t come clean about his health, and yet who is basically invulnerable to a primary challenge.
You have an Insurance Commissioner who is blatantly anti-consumer, who has already survived one primary attempt and will probably survive the next one.
You have a State Treasurer who [well, fill in the blank here] actually got his job by successfully primarying the incumbent and who (I’m taking bets here) has a good chance to survive a primary ala KWS.
You have a Lieutenant Governor who is a good guy and has done a lot of good things, but has spent the last five years being invisible and never really taking a public stand on anything. So there isn’t a lot of evidence he has the stones to take on the corporate/corrupt establishment.
You have a Governor who is immensely personally popular, but who consistently stiffs State Employees, rules by secret AG opinions, doles out tens of millions in corporate welfare, and has done about as much for DE education as Dubya did for the nation with No Child Left Behind, and he could nevertheless easily get elected for a third term if such were legal.
You have a Mayor of Wilmington who has no clue how to combat crime in the city, and yet who will pretty easily get re-elected when the time comes.
Your potential nominees for Progressive MVP in the other thread include Trey Paradee (who voted against marriage equality, IIRC) and Patti Blevins (who brokered the deal allowing Highmark to come to DE and be exempted from $145 million in reserve requirements and severely limited any power of the AG’s office to oversee their operations).
I will spare you talking about Senator Carper’s record, but no matter how he votes he is basically invulnerable.
The premise of one-party rule is that you’ll actually primary and drive out the people who are pretty much DINOs, except … at the highest levels of office the DINOs and the corrupt seem to flourish instead of going down in defeat. I will grant you that in the freshman and sophomore levels of the GA you’ve actually got a few of what you consider “real” Dems or Progressives in there, but it’s gonna be awhile before a Bryan Townsend or Karen Peterson is ready to take on your corporate shills and cronies, if only because all the people mentioned above have gazillions in their war chests.
So what’s your plan for taking back control of your own party?
(Note: this is a serious question.)