front page - editorial archives  - search - community

Native Intelligence
	Happy face belies D.C. disaster (Published January 26, 2004) By DIANA WINTHROP

In 1964, after the ratification of a constitutional amendment giving D.C. residents the right to vote for president, almost 90 percent of registered Democrats voted in the primary and almost 86 percent of all the registered citizens voted in the 1964 general election.

Forty years later, on a beautiful sunny but chilly primary election day, 43,000 registered Democrats – or 16 percent – voted in a non-binding presidential preference primary. Scott Bolden, chairman of the D.C. Democratic State Committee, enthusiastically declared that "our voices were heard loud and clear through the ballot box."

Was Bolden looking at a different set of election returns?

The idea that a 16 percent voter turnout, doubling the percentage from 2000, should be touted as a success is laughable. The buck stops with Bolden, who should take responsibility for the D.C. Democratic Party’s inability to cajole people to the polls.

The Jan. 13 primary failed miserably to achieve anything. There was virtually no broadcast media coverage, except a one-minute piece on National Public Radio. The newspaper coverage was, despite the exuberant statements from voting rights activists, paltry at best. The D.C. voting rights activists are even guiltier than Bolden, if that is possible, of overreaching and touting the primary turnout as a victory. Their letters to the editor, e-mails and press releases have been the height of hyperbole.

Since 1964, voter turnout has been on the decline except in a few isolated instances. While there may be enough finger-pointing to go around, at least people who voted in 1964 considered the act their civic duty. Today, disgruntled citizens complain about the undemocratic lack of representation, but are unable to link voting rights and their civic responsibility. And what worsens the situation is that D.C. residents are complainers who at the slightest change of the weather won’t set foot outside their homes. Anything but a perfect day keeps residents away from the polls.

It is a travesty.

Democratic Party officials and statehood activists seeking representation in Congress really shouldn’t have to cajole people to the polls, given the unfairness of our status. This is, after all, the nation’s capital. But since 1964, voter apathy has grown nationwide. Because party officials linked voting rights and the presidential primary process, they could have at least done a better job of getting out the vote.

A week after the D.C. Primary, it was five below zero in the Midwest on Jan. 19 and nearly 150,000 Iowa Democrats still came out of their homes to spend two hours debating presidential candidates’ positions on key issues before a record number voted at their neighborhood precinct caucuses.

Can you imagine a similar situation ever happening in the District? Not with the way the current party structure operates. While in Iowa average citizens play a key role in determining the state’s 58 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, unless something changes in the next few weeks, only party activists in D.C. will determine the delegate selection and whether those people will be committed to any candidates. They call it an "open system" – but, in reality, D.C. Democrats have a delegate election process that rewards officeholders, insiders and activists.

Pretending that a low voter turnout equals success does nothing to advance the cause of D.C. statehood or help spread the news nationwide about the injustice of the city’s disenfranchisement.

Sadly, adhering to Democratic Party rules has not helped advance the cause either. There is a certain irony in the current status of members of the D.C. Democratic State Committee. Many of the members who voted to reject efforts to make the District’s "first-in-the-nation" presidential primary binding, which would have violated national party rules, were civil rights and voting rights activists in the 1960s. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives, must have forgotten her early years as a voting rights activist. She played a key role in "reaching a compromise" that took all of the teeth out of the District’s primary.

Many so-called civil rights activists now serving on the Democratic State Committee voted to capitulate to pressure from the national party and its chairman, Terry McAuliffe. Once the city council voted to move the District’s primary to Jan. 13 to bring attention to the city’s lack of full congressional representation, there had been threats not to seat the District’s delegates at the Democratic National Convention if the primary was binding.

Those same activists seem to have forgotten about Martin Luther King Jr. and non-violent, civil disobedience. If the local party had any real convictions regarding statehood, its leaders would have thumbed their noses at McAuliffe, maintained a binding primary and then, next summer, forced the world to watch as the District’s delegates were removed from the convention floor. Now, that picture would bring attention to the District’s status!

Of course, that would mean Bolden and other D.C. party officials wouldn’t get to party with McAuliffe in Boston – but more U.S. citizens would learn of the injustice that D.C. residents endure.

Can you imagine the volume of television network coverage worldwide that the city would receive if the national party refused to seat the D.C. delegation? Could you image the delegates from the nation’s capital being dragged off the floor? The hyperbole expressed these past few weeks would be a thing of the past and people really would know the nation’s capital is devoid of representation.

***

Diana Winthrop is a native Washingtonian. Contact her at diana@thecommondenominator.com.

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator