A
few weeks after last year’s November elections, a gaggle of black elected
officials and political operatives met at the Harvard Community Center in
Cleveland’s Ward 1 to assess the aftermath of the statewide Republican sweep
and the uncertain landscape of local politics following the election of
Cuyahoga County’s first-ever county executive and county council.
The
meeting was the bright idea of State Senator Nina Turner and State
Representative Sandra Williams, two of the area’s more diligent state
legislators. They invited virtually every
local black elected official they could identify, including every black Democratic
precinct committee they knew about.
The
meeting drew plenty of suburban council people, as well as old political
heads-without-portfolio like Lang Dunbar, and Bill Crockett;
up-and-comers like Ward 11 Dem leader Anthony Hairston and Euclid councilman
David Gilliham, and seasoned operatives such as Lynnie Powell, Kenn Dowell, Michael Taylor,
and Bob Render.
The
stated agenda was to analyze the 2010 election returns, to try and divine the
reasons behind low and unenthusiastic voter turnout in black communities, and
to craft a forward-looking strategy.
The
approach was thoughtful. There was promise in the air when the meeting began
with perhaps sixty-five attendees arranged in a semi-circle. People were
initially respectful as Turner called the meeting to order, stated the agenda
and offered the podium to Arnold Pinkney, dean of local black politics.
That
was the high point of the meeting.
Mr. Pinkney’s
account of the election was distressingly feeble, astonishingly devoid of
insight, and absurdly self-serving in its assessment of the strategic and
tactical errors of the Ted Strickland/Ohio Democratic Party-led statewide
campaign. The essential takeaway from his presentation was that the state party
should have hired him to get out the vote instead of some out-of-state crew.
No
one challenged his eminence regarding this assessment so Sen. Turner then
attempted to move to the agenda’s next item: abysmal turnout by black voters.
It
serves no point to offer a blow-by-blow account of how the meeting quickly degenerated
into a verbal free-for-all. Suffice it to say there were destructive efforts to
derail if not highjack the agenda. These efforts had been primed if not planned
and led to silly and distressing assertions of political primacy and potency. The
leading protagonists were eventually restrained and the shouting match ended with
desultory attempts to restore a semblance of stability.
This
was such a depressing turn of events that I have been reluctant if not unable
to write about it.
• • •
There
was an elephant in the room that day whose gigantic shadow caused many of the attending
elected officials to become discombobulated. They behaved as if they were
playing musical chairs on quicksand. The music was cacophonous, and nobody knew
which of the too few chairs were safe to sit in.
The
cause of this erratic and discomfiting behavior was a radical realignment of
political forces on many levels. New networks were being empowered and you
couldn’t tell the players even with a scorecard.
On
the state level — Democrats had been thoroughly ousted. Republicans were in,
led by a combative governor who would soon demonstrate that black people had no
rights the GOP was bound to respect.
On
the county level, there reigned a new county executive, an Irish former G-man,
Ed FitzGerald. He owed much of his electoral victory to support rounded up by
newer black political leaders who were not in attendance: East Cleveland mayor
Gary Norton Jr., Cleveland councilmen T. J. Dow and Kevin Conwell, and suburban
leaders like Joe Fouche of Oakwood Village.
There
appeared to be not a single person in the room with an inkling of how FitzGerald
would deal with the black community and its established political leadership.
Moreover,
the uprooting of the corrupted county government structure had facilitated the
emergence of new leadership for the county Democratic Party. New party chairman
Stuart Garson had been selected, courted, and ratified by Congresswoman Marcia
Fudge as new party chair six months earlier, but his connections to the
rank-and-file were even more a mystery than FitzGerald’s.
To
cap it off, in two years on the job Fudge had yet to consolidate the mantle of
leadership that had flowed so long from the 11th District
Congressional seat, first from the dynastic authority and political skill of
Lou Stokes, and then from the dynamism and infectious indefatigability of Stephanie
Tubbs Jones.
So,
with every traditional political lighthouse either adrift or under uncertain or
foreign control, there should have been no surprise when the captain-less crew
engaged in unseemly jousting for control of the helm, shouted mutual accusations
of mutiny, and wanted to throw shipmates overboard.
This
sorry state of affairs has continued for much of the last year, as evidenced by
infighting among the leaders of the
Ohio Legislative Black Caucus over state legislative redistricting.
We
will look at that on Thursday.
