Thank-You, Gentle Reader!

My fellow Democrats here in Tampa sure do like to try to use my lumrant words against me, for some unknown reason! I am going to look upon it as a positive thing: it suggests that there must be at least a handful of readers of my site outside my immediate family. Gentle Reader, I write today for thee.

For the benefit of my traditional audience (my sister and my brother, unless I'm mistaken), let me explain: a recent e-mail to a group of local Democratic "leaders" featured yours truly on the distribution list. An unhappy response challenged my inclusion, which would perhaps have been debatable if the leadership group had been discussing matters of Super Secret District Leader Democratic Strategery, but of course that was not the case. My offense was that I had expressed disinterest in the local political game some time back while focusing on the stretch run for Kerry, who seemed to be doing a better job of making things happen for all concerned.

A classic e-mail battle ensued, which I steered clear of. My only comments at the very end were to implore everyone to attempt to focus on things that could actually build us up, as opposed to dividing and hampering us.

Before I continue my rant, I wanted to mention a couple of local newspaper columns that were published this weekend in the St. Pete Times. The first one was written by a reporter who covered the DEC election on Wednesday, and the second one was a human-interest piece about Alvin Wolfe, the DEC District Leader I worked with during the election.

Both of those articles will probably be archived and unavailable sometime soon, so the upshot is that the first one gives a pretty good accounting of the DEC election, and the second one praises Alvin for his public-service efforts, including the campaign work he did this past fall. The author of the election piece correctly concludes that we Democrats need to support our leaders and work ourselves out of the hole we're in, but he fails to do any homework to investigate or analyze the personal track record that our re-elected DEC leader has posted so far. Hmm...sort of reminds you of the kind of "reporting" that we've had to suffer through during the first Bush administration, doesn't it?

I found it ironic that it was the Alvin Wolfe article that contained the one piece of hard, analytical election-related info published that day (the recruitment of over 30 precinct captains)--and doubly-ironic since I was the primary owner of the "recruit precinct captains" task in our district! It's conceivable that ours was the only district that adopted the recruitment of precinct captains as a formal goal, which reflects both the disorganization of the DEC effort and the paranoid, don't-share-the-power attitude that seemed to dominate their thinking during the election push.

OK, where was I? Oh right--my "outing" by my intrepid Democratic colleagues. Well, I guess now I have another data point on the source of the outing, anyway, if not the rational explanation for why anyone would bother.

Keep reading, Gentle Reader!

- posted by John @ 7:55 PM