NH liberals are showing up on the radar
Democracy and the two-party system are working in New Hampshire, according to Dan DeWalt, an impeach-Bush activist in Vermont, writing for the national Arrianna Huffington Post June 6. At the state party convention in June, Democratic activists defeated the state leadership and passed an “impeach Bush” resolution on the convention floor. This was the next big blow after Carol Shea-Porter overwhelmed the state and national party establishment by winning the Democratic nomination for Congress from the 1st District. The national Democratic Campaign Committee took the almost unheard-of step of endorsing a candidate in a contested Democratic primary, and the even more unheard-of humiliation of losing.
"Howard Dean's famous scream may have capped the unraveling of his presidential campaign, but it was also the unwitting herald for a grass roots movement that six years later played a major role in overturning the Republican stranglehold on power, not only nationally, but across the river in New Hampshire as well. Now the same grassroots activists are taking the fight directly to Dr. Dean’s own Democratic Party establishment,” De Walt said.
Betty Hall of Brookline, who sponsored the impeachment resolution and ran a hopeless campaign for party chair that gathered strong, emotional support from the party’s liberal base, said, "I think that establishment Democrats don't understand what's out there. The dumb bunnies don't understand how angry people are."
Tim Butterworth of Chesterfield N.H. realized how angry he was when his granddaughter was born in 2003. He ended up running for and winning a seat in the House, and was impressed that every proposal that came forward from the body rather than the leadership passed. "As a group the Democratic Party would be much stronger if the leadership listens, leading the people in the direction they want to go" he said.
Shea-Porter and many state candidates like Butterworth benefited from the work of Democracy For N.H., the New Hampshire version of Democracy For America, a grass roots organization that Dean created to give new purpose to the volunteers who had worked for his campaign.
After defeating Hall, N.H. Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley has tapped two long time progressive state activists to create a grass roots committee for the party. According to committee co-chair Howard Morse, the party is aiding and abetting grass roots groups and is working to bring the various groups together under the Democratic Party umbrella. His co-chair Chaz Proulx describes it as a sea change. He is encouraged that the Democrats are taking the grass roots interests to heart.
Robert Perry of Strafford, who is one of the leaders of the House legislative impeachment effort, said "the success of the grass roots movement in N.H. has caused the leadership to pause and assess what it all means." He said the state party recognizes what the grass roots are doing and are making space for them in the party structures.
Though change is never fast enough for the activists themselves, whether they are liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans, this change is right on schedule and proceeding according to long-recognized historical patterns. First, the establishment ignores you, then they fight you, then they accommodate you. It’s a dynamic process, full of conflict, pull and tug, that usually follows this pattern if the activists are strong, well-organized, and too committed to give up and go away after a setback.
It’s also how activists move their issues into the mainstream and get them adopted, and how parties find new blood and new energy. No activists ever did that better than evangelical Christians and conservative intellectuals in the Republican Party. Before that, labor unions, liberal intellectuals and minority groups dominated national government through the Democratic Party.
For a democracy where most people are moderates, not activists, this swinging pendulum is the source of our stability and ability to adapt to a changing world, without going too far to any extreme for too long. We saw the end of New Deal democracy in 1968, the high water mark of conservative Republicanism in the Reagan years, and we might be seeing the beginning of a swing in a new direction today, as one-time Reagan Repubicans pervert his philosophy, openness and competence.
In New Hampshire, for that movement to mean anything, the moderate center would need to accept an honest conversation of what the state really needs to do, and how to pay for it. So far, we have had two Democratic governors, Lynch and Shaheen, who were not ready to risk going there. Maybe a future one will be, with a stronger, more progressive base in his or her own party. That would be a change.
