"Well, now you're all lying."
I sit on the Cumberland County Democratic Committee. And last night we had a meeting where we dissected our one loss from the last election. Unfortunately it was a big one.
If any of you remember a politician named Lou Magazzu who pulled the same boneheaded move that Anthony Weiner did this year, he was our County Chairman and a member of the Board of Freeholders in our county. The election we lost was the special election to fill his seat, which forced us to defend all four Democratic Freeholder seats at once in November. Our candidate in the special election lost by 480 votes, or about 2% of the vote.
There were a lot of charges of racism among voters, and the term "Bradley Effect" got thrown around a lot, because the candidate (an African-American minister) didn't poll as well as his ticket-mates in the two larger municipalities in our County. This led to a lot of discussion and a lot of denial about people voting in a bigoted manner.
That forced me to stand up.
"How many people in this room," I asked, "were members of this committee last year?" About half of them raised their hands (we had a large influx of new members right after the 2011 primary).
"Now, of those of you with your hands up, how many of you would vote to endorse a segregationist?" Every hand went down.
"Well, now you're all lying," I let them know, "because you did just that back in June."
In June, our committee voted nearly unanimously (I was the only dissenter) to endorse the State Senate and Assembly slate that led our ticket this year. These were candidates, registered Democrats mind you, who two years before not only voted down gay marriage in New Jersey they made robocalls bragging about how they were more anti-gay marriage than the Republicans were that year.
"If any of them had said such a thing about African American rights, would any of you allowed them to run on our ticket?"
I was met with silence.
"So don't tell me there's no racism, or bigotry, that affects our voting. God knows there's bigotry right here in this room and you just don't realize it yet."
Then I sat down.
One of the outgoing Freeholders took me to task privately for my statements, saying that while she understood my positions, that I was "a bit too blunt and aggressive."
"Sometimes," I told her, "you have to shock people out of their comfort zone to make them see what they don't want to see."
We'll see what happens next time, now that their comfort zone has been invaded.
On a related note, can someone put me in touch with the New Jersey branch of Stonewall Democrats? I think we need a branch down here in Cumberland County.
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