Chris Devaney – Memphis Flyer

Well, to the surprise of no one, national political columnists began last week to suggest that national Democrats should write the South off for any major election from this point forward. This came in the wake of the defeat of Mary Landrieu recently, as Louisiana failed to reelect her to the United States Senate for a fourth term.

No, it’s not good right now for Southern Democrats, confined, for the time being, to urban areas and rural areas dominated by people of color. Why, indeed, shouldn’t we say to hell with it and all move north, or east, or to California?

Because we love it here, that’s why, and the South is worth fighting for. We have to do it slowly; what happened here didn’t just happen overnight with the election of Barack Obama, though that may have brought things to a head. So, how did we get to this place?

Part of the problem for Democrats in the South is that many people were Democrats not based on a liberal or progressive ideology, but because those #$%@ Republicans started the War of Northern Aggression, as it is inaccurately referred to in these parts. Their mommas, daddies, grandparents, everyone was a Democrat back then.

However, after the Civil Rights Act of 1965 was passed, and southern Democrats began to realize that government assistance was for all people, not just people who looked like them, a slow and steady migration took place. Republicans now control every house of every legislature in the South, even Arkansas.

So, we know how Democrats got here, but how do they swing the pendulum back? The first thing Democrats must do as a party is to stop running away from national Democratic issues and causes. People respect you when you stand up for what you are, clearly and concisely define yourself, and don’t allow your opponents to do that for you. That has been a particular problem here in Tennessee.

What Chris Devaney and the Tennessee GOP are doing with their “Red to the Roots” program to elect Republicans at every level is exactly what Tennessee Democrats should have done 30 years ago, when they had the legislative advantage. Pity that they never conceived that they would be out of power.

The road back for Democrats has to begin at the local and county levels. Whoever is elected on January 10th to succeed Roy Herron as chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party needs to have a plan in place to get the county Democratic parties functional at every level — raising money, recruiting candidates, and honing a message that reflects Democratic values.

To paraphrase the great Howard Dean, we need a 95-county strategy. This is partially to get local Democrats excited and get them working for our values and candidates, and partially to get money out of Nashville and into the outlying counties, like Dean did with his 50-state strategy, by getting money away from Washington and its too-conservative Democratic consultants.

More than anything else, we need to stand for specific values that support families, workers, and small businesses, and not big business, big banking, and Wall Street. Draw that line in the sand and stand by it; respect can only follow.

This isn’t going to be easy, especially when most national media refuse to challenge or call out Wall Street or big business, since that’s who owns national media. It’s hard to get a message that isn’t Fox News or Rush Limbaugh to areas like Weakley or Obion counties, who get their televised local news from Paducah, Kentucky, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, or Harrisburg, Illinois. The same can be said for southern Middle Tennessee, which gets its television news from Huntsville, Alabama.

This is why our new chair and the executive committee will have to build their own communication networks via person-to-person contact and social media to get the message out. That’s where having clear, concise Democratic values and messages are crucial to regaining the trust of people who have been scared off from the Democratic Party.

It’s time to be proud Democrats in Tennessee and throughout the South. The way back starts now.

Memphian Steve Steffens is a Democratic activist and the proprietor of the well-read blog LeftWingCracker.blogspot.com.

Well, let’s just go ahead and admit it. If Knoxville state Senator Stacey Campfield’s fellow Republicans succeed in purging him, via an establishment-backed candidate, in this August’s GOP primary, we may join in the public celebration that is

almost certain to occur. But we’ll be shamming a little bit.

The fact is, if he goes, we’ll miss Stacey. Who else but Mr. “Don’t Say Gay,” aka Senator “Starve the Children,” is anywhere near as capable of raising to consciousness the most outrageous and unworthy thoughts still extant in a Western Civilization striving to live up to its textbook ideals?

Who else is so good at giving voice to the undeclared agenda that is at the heart of the current Tea-Party-dominated Tennessee General Assembly?

“Starve the children?” Maybe an overstatement — though that’s exactly what was at the core of Campfield’s late, unlamented bill to take state assistance away from households whose children happened to be failing at school. “Ignore the children and starve their parents” is more accurate as a description of an administration and a legislature that have run riot over local school boards’ wishes and made it impossible for concepts such as minimum wage and living wage even to be discussed by the state’s city and county jurisdictions. So, of course, let’s add the concept of “disempower local governments” as an aspect of the overall state GOP mantra.

Campfield is down with all that — and more. But he has begun to offend his masters in the state Republican Party. Why? Because he talks too much (and writes too much on his blog), expressing too candidly what’s really on the mind of his party leaders. He’s blabbing state secrets, as it were.

Campfield may finally have crossed the line this week, however, and in so doing has become a candidate for official elimination. On his tacky/sassy online blog Camp4u, he supplied the following “Thought of the Week” on Monday: ”Democrats bragging about the number of mandatory sign ups for Obamacare is like Germans bragging about the number of manditory sign ups for “train rides” for Jews in the ’40s.”

Comparing insurance company sign-ups for health care to the annihilation of Jews in Hitler’s Final Solution? Not one ranking Republican, let alone Democrats and just folks, was willing to follow him there. The statement was, as state Democratic Chairman Roy Herron said, “outrageous, pathetic, and hateful.” To be sure. But what delights us more are almost identical statements by state GOP Chairman Chris Devaney (“No political or policy disagreement should ever be compared to the suffering endured by an entire generation of people.”) and House GOP Majority Leader Gerald McCormick (“[The] disgraceful blog post compared a policy dispute with the suffering of an entire race of people … .”)

And there, in a nutshell (ahem), is Campfield’s redeeming public service: By going so outrageously far afield, he is forcing his party’s leaders — who have done their share of demonizing the political opposition — into admitting that all their public bluster and invective aimed at Democrats is really just policy disagreement in disguise.

Fine, then. Let us henceforth reason together — and be thankful to Campfield for his own (inadvertent) contribution to political dialogue.