by David Weigel
A report from Alabama:
I’m a resident of Birmingham, Alabama; an acquaintance of Patricia Todd’s; and a longtime foot soldier for various Democratic Party causes down here (I worked my tail off for the Kerry campaign two years ago and am helping out one of our Democratic candidates for a statewide judicial race). I know quite a few people at various levels of the state party organization, and your post on Patricia, particularly the implication that the state Democratic Party was involved in a comprehensive attempt to get her purged from the House seat she’d won fair and square, is inaccurate.
Not that the truth is much more flattering, but this categorically is not an anti-gay crusade on the part of Todd’s opponents. Rather, this has to do with the fact that the 54th House District had long been held by African-American representatives but was won by a white woman, and one man, Joe Reed, decided he didn’t like it.
Dr. Reed is, as the New York Times article states, highly influential in the state Democratic Party, but by no means do his various opinions reflect the official stance of the party as a whole. In fact, one of the top three state Party officials testified at the Democratic subcommittee hearing that the obscure finance-report-filing rule hadn’t been complied with by ANY candidate in years, so there was no point in arbitrarily invoking it now. But Joe Reed’s going to do what Joe Reed’s going to do, and so now we’re stuck in the current situation.
None of this is to say that Dr. Reed and Gaynelle Hendricks’s supporters haven’t behaved abominably, because they have. And again, Reed’s influence in the state party apparatus is considerable. But your post gives the heavy implication that the entire state party is somehow anti-gay and that the effort to deny Patricia her seat is official policy, and that simply isn’t the case.
I hope you’ll post a correction or a clarification of this either on Hit & Run or on Sullivan’s blog, because we here in Alabama have to take enough crap as it is from Democrats and Republicans alike in the rest of the country about being backward and hate-filled; we don’t need inaccurate reports from "outsiders" making matters worse. Again, the truth of this matter is not something I’m the least bit proud of either, but it is not completely as you have described it.
I’ve corrected the post to make it clear the official Democratic party isn’t in charge. This stuff gets lost in translation.
The Dish 