Temporiti’s speech to the West County Democrats concluded with remarks about primary contests and super delegates.

Although he concedes any Democrat’s right to run in a given contest, he really, really dislikes contested primaries and works to get the candidate most likely to win running uncontested. And he’s quick to point out that he talks to the parties involved with great empathy because he’s been there. In 1988, when Dick Gephardt tried for the Democratic presidential nomination, Temporiti ran for Gephardt’s seat. Seven months into that campaign, Gephardt withdrew from the presidential race and asked Temporiti to drop out of the race for the third congressional seat. Which Temporiti did–“for the good of the party.”

Sure, a contested primary can gain the eventual winner more name recognition, but it can also cost an extra four or five million dollars in, say, a gubernatorial race. Oh how he’d love to see Steelman and Hulshof knock each other around and spend wads of cash these next five months.

And speaking of that race, having Blunt withdraw is huge. Temporiti believes we’d have beaten Blunt, but it would have been close. Beating Hulshof or Steelman will be easier.

Given the state chairman’s philosophy about contested primaries, it’s safe to assume he’ll be discussing the race in the second congressional district, Todd Akin’s seat, with the three candidates involved: Mike Garman, Byron DeLear, and David Pentland. Temporiti knows he can’t order anyone to drop out, but he does, in these situations, ask each one to consider how well he fits the voter profile in that district, what kind of financial backing he has, how hard his supporters will work for him, and what his own goals in politics are.

Someone in the audience asked what he thought of our chances in that race. “As good as I’ve ever seen it,” he said with a big smile.

Let me interject here that 58 percent of the ballots cast in St. Charles County were Democratic, and 54 percent in Lincoln County were. If those figures hold for next November, the eventual nominee would have to take 44 percent of the vote in West St. Louis County to win. That won’t be an easy feat. In 2006, George “Boots” Weber only got 36.6 percent of the vote in the whole district–and presumably much less than 36 percent in West County. Even taking into account that Weber was a weak candidate, it will still take good funding, super hard campaigning, and a good sized dollop of luck to make 44 percent of the West County vote end up in the Dem column.

Good luck, Mr. Temporiti, in winnowing that field to the strongest candidate. Akin needs to be history.

As a super delegate, Temporiti had some comments to make about his plans in that role. Missouri has sixteen super delegates. Ten of them are committed: five for Clinton, five for Obama. Temporiti has not committed himself and says it’s kind of fun getting phone calls from the likes of Bill Clinton. But he won’t make up his mind right away. He’ll base the decision on which way Missouri is going (it’s so even that this guideline is almost moot), on which one he thinks can beat McCain, and–very important–on getting something for Missouri from his vote. Specifically,  he will be looking for an assurance that the nominee will not pull out of Missouri early as Kerry did. Temporiti’s take on ’04 is that our state ended up with four years of Matt Blunt because Kerry pulled out.

My impression from scattered comments after the speech, was that most of the audience appreciated Temporiti’s pragmatic approach to politics. I do, when it comes to his urging the candidates least likely to win the general election into withdrawing early.

I even grudgingly admit that it does us little good to run only pro-choice candidates if that means we don’t end up in control of the House or the Senate. After all, if we win the House, the issue of abortion doesn’t even come up because the speaker doesn’t allow it to. But if we’re pure as the driven snow on this issue, run only pro-choice candidates, and lose the House, that’s when we get bombarded with some of the lunatic bills on abortion that are being introduced this session.

So far, so good. But I found myself disagreeing with the state chairman on an issue where he assumed unanimous agreement: he is vastly proud of Missouri for, as he puts it, taking control of the U.S. Senate. If Claire McCaskill hadn’t won in Missouri, we wouldn’t have the majority in the Senate. That’s true, of course, and naturally I’d rather have McCaskill than Talent, most of the time anyway. But her recent FISA betrayal would have done Jim Talent proud. McCaskill is a mixed blessing.

Oh well, the state party is hardly going to put someone in charge who would badmouth the party’s top elected official. Still, it would have been refreshing to hear Mr. Temporiti admit that she crossed a line when she refused to uphold the Constitution.

Update: It turns out there are four candidates in the Second Congressional District. Bill Haas is also running–as he so often does, for various offices. (And he’s a perennial candidate for mayor of St. Louis.) He doesn’t live in the second, but that’s not required for a person to run. If he were to win, he’d have to move there to serve.  

I’ve supported neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama because I didn’t see either one as supporting the middle class and the poor economically. That may be changing.

David Sirota, a blogger who is focused particularly on the corporatization of America, recently criticized Obama, even while admitting that he (Sirota) understood Obama’s shying away from populist rhetoric:

Obama has let Clinton characterize the 1990s as a nirvana, rather than a time that sowed the seeds of our current troubles. He barely criticizes the Clinton administration for championing job-killing trade agreements. He does not question that same administration’s role in deregulating the financial industry and thereby intensifying today’s boom-bust catastrophes. And he rarely points out what McClatchy Newspapers reported this week: that Clinton spent most of her career at a law firm “where she represented big companies and served on corporate boards,” including Wal-Mart’s.

Obama hasn’t touched any of this for two reasons.

First, his campaign relies on corporate donations. Though Obama certainly is less industry-owned than Clinton, the Washington Post noted last spring that he was the top recipient of Wall Street contributions. That cash is hush money, contingent on candidates silencing their populist rhetoric.

But while this pressure to keep quiet affects all politicians, it is especially intense against black leaders.

“If Obama started talking like John Edwards and tapped into working-class, blue-collar proletarian rage, suddenly all of those white voters who are viewing him within the lens of transcendence would start seeing him differently,” says Charles Ellison of the University of Denver’s Center for African American Policy.

That’s because once Obama parroted Edwards’ attacks on greed and inequality, he would “be stigmatized as a candidate mobilizing race,” says Manning Marable, a Columbia University history professor.

That is, the media would immediately portray him as another Jesse Jackson – a figure whose progressivism has been (unfairly) depicted as racial politics anathema to white swing voters.

Sirota’s most recent column says that Obama is finally talking the progressive talk–which gives me some hope that he might even walk the progressive walk:

But with the next round of states overrepresenting for the constituencies Obama has done most poorly among – working-class whites and Latinos – he knows he has to try to thread the needle. He has to try to offer up more full-throated, class-based populism. And indeed, that’s what he’s doing. In his victory speech last night, Obama hammered the North American Free Trade Agreement, previewing a major economic speech today. Here are some excerpts:

   

“It’s a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear; workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years…So today, I’m laying out a comprehensive agenda to reclaim our dream and restore our prosperity. It’s an agenda that focuses on three broad economic challenges that the next President must address – the current housing crisis; the cost crisis facing the middle-class and those struggling to join it; and the need to create millions of good jobs right here in America- jobs that can’t be outsourced and won’t disappear.

   For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America. I’m proposing a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years. This investment will multiply into almost half a trillion dollars of additional infrastructure spending and generate nearly two million new jobs – many of them in the construction industry that’s been hard hit by this housing crisis. The repairs will be determined not by politics, but by what will maximize our safety and homeland security; what will keep our environment clean and our economy strong. And we’ll fund this bank by ending this war in Iraq. It’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money on putting America back together instead…

   It’s also time to look to the future and figure out how to make trade work for American workers. I won’t stand here and tell you that we can – or should – stop free trade. We can’t stop every job from going overseas. But I also won’t stand here and accept an America where we do nothing to help American workers who have lost jobs and opportunities because of these trade agreements. And that’s a position of mine that doesn’t change based on who I’m talking to or the election I’m running in.

   You know, in the years after her husband signed NAFTA, Senator Clinton would go around talking about how great it was and how many benefits it would bring. Now that she’s running for President, she says we need a time-out on trade. No one knows when this time-out will end. Maybe after the election.

   I don’t know about a time-out, but I do know this – when I am President, I will not sign another trade agreement unless it has protections for our environment and protections for American workers. And I’ll pass the Patriot Employer Act that I’ve been fighting for ever since I ran for the Senate – we will end the tax breaks for companies who ship our jobs overseas, and we will give those breaks to companies who create good jobs with decent wages right here in America.”

This is really terrific stuff, and I say that as someone who has been critical of Obama in the past for his timidity on issues like trade – issues that make the Establishment particularly uncomfortable.

I recommend reading the rest of Sirota’s comments. And, like him, I hope to see Obama follow through on this encouraging start.

The Senate voted today on a bill to extend production tax credits to companies involved in clean energy projects. It failed 58-41 (60 needed to stop a Republican filibuster), but it will be voted on again at a later date.

Kit Bond voted against extending the production tax credit. McCaskill voted for it.

John Temporiti, chairman of the Missouri Democratic Party since last March, exuded energy and optimism in his speech Monday to the West County Democrats. He’s a businessman, proud of his years at the helm of Mayflower Moving and set on applying his business experience to taking all the Democratic seats possible in this state next fall.

He has a strategic plan of goals that are reviewed every 60-90 days by teleconference. The plan was prepared–at no cost to the party–by the man who did the strategic planning for Mayflower when Temporiti was CEO there. So you could get the impression that this job is just business calculations for him, especially since he began by pointing out that when he took over last March, the party was $300,000 in debt, and they raised $1.2 million last year. He might seem like nothing more than a green eyeshade type when he tells you that he now has twenty people on his staff and a monthly payroll of $100,000 to meet. Or when he says that Jay’s campaign manager, Ken Morley, hired in January 2007–that’s how long we’ve been serious about Nixon’s campaign–is one of the top three managers in the country and he doesn’t come cheap. (But hiring Morley and focusing on properly allocating our resources has been worth it, he thinks: “Wasn’t it the greatest thing, and no accident, that we beat an incumbent governor, Matt Blunt, without even going to the ballot?”) Temporiti sounds like a numbers cruncher in pointing out that the party is calling half a million people who voted Democratic in ’06 in order to get their profiles–addresses, e-mails, phone numbers–so that activists knocking on doors this year can use their time most efficiently.

He’ll tell you that “this is the business approach to the art of politics.” But his calculating methods aren’t the whole story. Temporiti feels a sense of history, and says that at this critical time in American history, Democrats have the momentum.

“This is our time. This is our time. Think of what’s at stake here, in our country, in this state, and in the world, and it’s not a very good picture. Now I am not a negative kind of guy. … I’m usually optimistic. But I’m a little bit troubled, to say the least, by what’s been going on. And I’m not standing for it anymore. So, one, this is our time. Two, though, imagine if we don’t take advantage of this opportunity. I don’t think I could live with myself very well. And I hope you can’t either. So it’s a double responsibility, because we have a sense of time and momentum that is unique.

That passion pushes Temporiti to organize the party. He has always been aware of how highly organized Republicans are. They have all the wrong ideas, but they win elections anyway, because they’re so focused.

These guys are good. They’re ruthless, they’re well-financed, and they’re good. And trust me, we’ll be just as appropriately ruthless and well-financed and good as we need to be.

The demographics of Missouri will help Temporiti accomplish his goals: the voters are 38 percent Democratic and 32 percent Republican. The rest are Independents and right now we are attracting those Independents at a rate of 2:1. Almost a quarter of  million more people took Democratic ballots in the primary than took Republican ballots.

In the end, though, pragmatism trumps passion for Temporiti. He feels that it does no good to have diversity–to be the real big tent party–and to passionately want social justice if we don’t win elections. Can we currently take our complaints about the way things are run to the governor? Or to the House? Or to the Senate? Nope. So he tries to get candidates who are the best fit for the districts they will run in. And that includes getting a pro-life candidate in Harry Kennedy’s first district senate seat. That’s a pro-life district where Kennedy is termed out, and Temporiti has no intention of letting that seat go to a Republican. (I know some of you will disagree with him. Feel free to say so in the comments section.)

But more important than anything in winning elections, to his mind, is sticking to our core values: jobs and the economy, health care, and education. Over the decades, Democrats have claimed those issues and we need to constantly remind voters that that’s who we are. It’s because those are our values that he gets frustrated with people in good union jobs–a couple earning, say, $110,000–who move to St. Charles and start voting Republican! “Give me a break,” says Temporiti. We need to remind those people where they came from and how they got where they are and then urge them to do the right thing.

Because Republicans don’t really care about the issues of jobs, health care, and education, they will always be the minority party–a party that survives in part by redrawing the lines in redistricting years to favor itself. Winning this year is crucial because 2010 is a census year. If we don’t want those lines redrawn to their advantage, we need the governorship.

Naturally, Mr. Chairman plugged the need, then, to support the state Democratic Party by joining it. The money the party brings in goes to help in the governor’s race, as well as House and Senate races. I went to www.missouridems.org, looked in the righthand column where I saw “Join the MDP or renew your membership”, and paid this year’s dues. I recommend you do the same.

I’ll have more to say in my next posting about Temporiti’s comments, specifically about how Blunt’s withdrawal affects our chances of getting the governor’s seat, how he sees our chances of taking Akin’s seat in the second congressional district, his activities in trying to prevent contested primaries, and his own role as a Democratic super delegate.

Even those of you who aren’t from the St. Louis area have probably read about the Kirkwood resident who killed five people last Thursday at a Kirkwood City Council meeting and was then gunned down by police. One of the best known residents of Kirkwood is Franklin McCallie, a former principal of Kirkwood High School. He released a statement that the Kirkwood-Webster Times printed. It sheds light on what led up to that nightmare.

February 09, 2008

As the former 22 year principal of Kirkwood High School and a Kirkwood citizen for the past 29 years, I knew, respected, and had affection for every single person involved in the terrible tragedy which took place in our community Thursday night, Feb. 7th.

Five years ago in 2003, I communicated with my friend Cookie Thornton in one-on-one meetings and through phone calls for almost five months – from late January to early May – in trying to reach a solution to his stalemate with the Kirkwood City Council and the Kirkwood Department of Public Works.

Cookie was a vivacious, enthusiastic member of the Kirkwood Community and had been an extremely popular student at Kirkwood High School. Since he graduated five years before I became principal, I did not meet him until he returned to Kirkwood to form his own construction company. In most cases, Cookie had no trouble getting along with anyone. He was a full-time booster for young people’s activities within the Meacham Park neighborhood and the wider Kirkwood community. He was one of the most out-going persons I ever met. He proposed to his wife at a Club 44 young people’s banquet in front of over 100 kids and adults. My wife and I attended his wedding to his wonderful wife and educator, Maureen, and I saw him often in the community. We hugged each time we met.

However, Cookie encountered a major problem concerning his construction company. He and I discussed this situation at length and studied several hundred pages of legal documents together. Most of those documents ticketed Cookie for parking his construction equipment in places not designated for such machinery. I talked with both black and white citizens who were annoyed over his habit of parking machinery where he thought it was acceptable, but was not legal under Kirkwood ordinance. In the largely African American neighborhood in which he lived, St. Louis County had not enforced these rules very closely. But when citizens in Meacham Park and Kirkwood voted for Kirkwood to annex the Meacham Park neighborhood, the Kirkwood administration began to enforce these ordinances, and Cookie perceived he was being mistreated and made to conform to an overly strict interpretation of the laws. Both white and African American friends told Cookie he must adjust to the law, but Cookie decided that he was being targeted and discriminated against by city officials.

When his fines for tickets grew to thousands of dollars, Cookie told me that Kirkwood officials said they would drop all fines if he would adjust to the law. In our long talks, I begged him to do this, but Cookie said it was a matter of principle that he should sue the city for discriminating against him for “PWB: parking while black.”

I, among others, then suggested that he drop his opposition and stop harassing the council members in open meeting or get a lawyer and sue the city to see what the legal system would rule. I also wrote letters to the city council to say that Cookie and I were working on this problem, and I had positive communication with the mayor and other council members and the head of the Department of Public Works, all of whom expressed the desire to settle this matter between Cookie and themselves.

However, at the end of five months of studying documents, talking, and visiting construction sites with Cookie, he was no closer to believing that he was not being targeted unfairly, even though I was not the only close friend-white or black-telling him that he was mistaken in his perception, at least as pertains to his construction equipment. He loved his home city of Kirkwood, but he became obsessed with his perceived mistreatment, and he acted out in council meetings in a way that no one would have expected. At some meetings, he held a sign labeling the mayor a “jackass” and then spoke gibberish for three minutes, implying that this was the only way to communicate with a “jackass.”

In one open meeting, I rose to say to the council that Cookie Thornton was a close friend of mine but that I disagreed with the treatment that he was giving to these public servants who were attempting to run a good city government. Cookie continued to embrace me after that public statement, but still did not agree with me.

The above description is accurate as pertains to construction equipment. As is often the case, however, with relationships between blacks and whites in the American society, general community issues were a poignant background to Cookie’s specific issues of racism. After the annexation of Meacham Park to Kirkwood, the city council approved the creation of a shopping mall which required the destruction of a large number of homes in Meacham Park. Some residents, including Cookie, welcomed the buy-out and redevelopment of Meacham Park; others protested vehemently. Some black and white citizens still cite certain details in the buy-out as “racist insensitivity” by the white power structure. Cookie believed his company had been promised significant demolition work. When he did not get it, he told me it was one more act of discrimination against a black businessman, with all money going to white companies for destroying black houses.

Thus, the specific issue of parking construction equipment and the fines for those acts under Kirkwood ordinance were bundled together in Cookie’s mind with an overall perception of racism over issues which many other citizens in Meacham Park also perceived. Many Meacham Park citizens protested the destruction of their homes for a mall. They perceived one more racist slight by the powerful white community over the smaller and powerless black community. Meacham Park residents who protested this issue, however, did so in orderly and constructive meetings under leadership from the Meacham Park Neighborhood Association.

Why, then, did the events of Thursday night, Feb. 7, take place? The horror of the act and the pain of Kirkwoodians with whom I have spoken are crushing. Based on my interaction with Cookie, I believe the obsession of discrimination – whether real or perceived – overwhelmed Cookie’s judgment, causing him to do something completely against his normal nature. Cookie Thornton wounded the mayor and a newspaper journalist. Worst yet, he killed two outstanding professionals on the Kirkwood police force and three equally wonderful public servants within our city government in a brutal, inexcusable act, the act of a person in vengeful, mental chaos.

These exceptional persons are an unimaginable loss to our community. Kirkwoodians will sorely miss their daily contributions to our civic and personal lives. Our grief will be long and painful throughout Kirkwood, including the Meacham Park neighborhood.

As wrong as Cookie Thornton was in his judgment about the specifics of his parking fines and his terrible acts on that Thursday night, I am convinced Kirkwood will only move forward again as we acknowledge our need to come together as one people.