Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Play Nice

You can't always play nice in politics. As Roy Barnes once said, this is a blood sport. It is, I know, and some issues are worth the bleeding, but there are times when the process chews up perfectly good people for no good reason. For example, I was sad to get email today announcing that the constituency vice chair for the DPG, Virgilio Perez Pascoe, has resigned. Let me be clear, I have no information about why he resigned, but it sure is sad to lose him. Virgilio is relatively new to party politics-something most of us saw as a plus. He comes from a corporate background where the trains generally run on time. I know for a fact that he spent a tremendous amount of time making sure that the whole delegate selection process worked as well as it possibly could've. For example, he met my husband, who is the 8th district congressional chair, in Macon at 8 p.m. on Friday night to give him the materials for the caucus the next day and then went back to Americus to be the DPG rep at that caucus the next day. That doesn't even begin to count the many, many meetings that he chaired or attended in the run up to this process. Perhaps his departure is unrelated to the stress of that process, but the timing sure is curious. The bottom line is that we can't afford to lose these newly engaged Democrats.

All of these party officers-from Jane on down-are volunteers. Yet, many give full time or nearly full time to their posts at the party. For their trouble, they also get to be the whipping posts when things aren't going well. That's understandable to a degree-they should be accountable to the duties of their elected posts, but it seems to me that the party would be stronger if we spent as much energy complimenting as complaining.

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