KALICH – Democrats must enjoy taste of defeat
But the party is back to its same old internal squabbling in Mississippi, with a faction wanting to oust the newly hired executive director, Sam Hall, and return the scoundrel Ike Brown to a leadership post.
Now a segment of that dysfunctional political party wants to reinstate Brown.
If that effort is successful, it will be playing right into the Republican strategy of turning the Democrats into a fringe, marginalized party.
The Mississippi GOP has been steadily picking up whites who feel the Democratic Party has no place for them any longer. At first, the defectors were Dixiecrats — heavily conservative whites who were Democrats only because they couldn’t get over their Civil War-era hang-up about the Republicans being the party of Lincoln. In recent years, though, more moderate white Democrats have also changed sides, unable to relate to a party that seems too liberal for its tastes or too racially one-sided.
There were inklings, though, that a new Democratic coalition — blacks, working-class whites as well as younger white voters — was just starting to coalesce in this state. The biracial appeal of the Obama candidacy demonstrated visibly that success can come just as easily by uniting the races as dividing them.
The Democratic faction that wants to bring Brown back into the party fold apparently didn’t pay attention.
Tim Kalich
Greenwood Commonwealth
3/28/9
