Allen Hallmark Up Close: First Person, Present Tense

Local Democrats jostle over how best to encourage Democrats to vote. It looks messy because democracy is messy.

Allen Hallmark: Facebook portrait

Today's post: A letter from a political soldier, writing from the battlefront of Democratic politics.

It is one slice of the story of what is happening on the American left. Factions are jostling for control of the Party, its message, and the future of the country.

Jackson County Democrats abruptly adjourned a packed meeting on Thursday, ending discussion of a proposal to change the way Democrats organized the data and volunteers for its Get-Out-The-Vote program. People disagreed over whether the proposal itself was a good idea, plus whether the process to evaluate the new idea was a good one. It was unruly, with heckling and shouted questions from the audience.

I post on this subject because it is a microcosm of the energy--and division--within the Democratic party nationally. What happened here was a confluence of political ideology, personal ambitions of some of the players, political alliances of groups within the party, personal friendships, and old grudges and resentments. 

The past isn't past, and people are motivated to shape the future. 

Guest Post: Allen Hallmark.  

Allen Hallmark's letter to fellow Democratic activists is a primary source document. His letter is a snapshot. He doesn't tell the whole story, nor fully explain the context, nor the personalities, nor the details of the proposal that was not accepted. He was writing to people who already knew the context. 

Readers should read this, instead, like a letter home from an army corporal in an infirmary near the battle front. The corporal describes what he saw, his experience, his up close view, not the whole big picture war. That's what makes it authentic and useful.

Hallmark is a former reporter for the Mail Tribune, where he covered local government and politics. News coverage was far more extensive then. Every single weekday he would write two or three stories about county government, typically with one story appearing on page one and the remainder on page three. He is retired now, and volunteers for the local Democratic Party.  

[Note: Hallmark gave me permission to quote this letter. It is lightly edited, primarily to flesh out abbreviations.]

   "Dear my fellow Precinct Committee Persons,

   Yes, I’m resigning my position as chair of our Neighborhood Leader Program’s Steering Committee. I do so with a heavy heart and not because our proposed GOTV (get out the vote) Pilot Program was rejected by the majority at Thursday night’s Central Committee meeting by moving to adjourn suddenly.

    No, I’m resigning because I just can’t deal with the increasing incivility exhibited by some members of both the Central Committee and the Executive Committee. I knew that getting the GOTV Pilot Program passed on such as short timeline was a very longshot, indeed, but the members of our Steering Committee thought it worth a shot. But I don’t think that Tonya Graham was given a fair chance to present the proposal before being bombarded with questions before she could finish her presentation.

    We brought the proposal to the Central Committee on Thursday because we were told that there would not be another opportunity for it to be heard until the Sept. 28th Central Committee meeting, which would have been too late in the campaign.

    In the simplest terms, the GOTV Pilot Program proposal was for the Jackson County Democratic Neighborhood Leader Program to disaffiliate from the Democratic Party of Oregon’s NLP just for this general election campaign and ask our Neighborhood Leaders to work through Cathy Shaw’s Operation GOTV for this election only--and only if Shaw signed a legally binding contract to turn over the data she has gathered over the past decade or so to the Jackson County Democrats so that in all future elections there would be just one GOTV effort, and it would be run by the JC Democratic Party. At present there are two separate GOTV programs that sometimes overlap.  Merging the two programs for this one election would have given our candidates the best shot at winning and after the election we potentially could have doubled the number of Neighborhood Leaders.

    As I say, I was not at all confident that our Pilot Program proposal would pass and if there had been a civil, respectful hearing after which a motion was made and had gone down to defeat, I would have had no problem with the result, and our committee would have gone back to preparing for the coming election as the NLP affiliated with the Democratic Party of Oregon's program.

    But there was no civil and respectful hearing of the proposal. Instead, there was bullying, bluster and acrimony.

    In my view our Party has been invaded by zealots of the left just as in 2010 the national Republican Party was taken over by zealots from the right, known as the Tea Party. Our Revolution Southern Oregon and its allies (some of whom have been elected to leadership roles and aspire to even higher positions) have done a super job of recruiting like-minded people to apply to be Precinct Committee People.    

    That’s why many of you became PCPs – thank you!

    Although Our Revolution Southern Oregon (ORSO) is not a Standing Committee of the Jackson County Democratic Party, I think we’d be better off if it were. Then, we’d have some transparency from that group about its members, its goals and its tactics. It seems to me that ORSO is using many of the tactics of the Tea Party to achieve its goals, among which are electing its members to all the leadership positions and especially all the delegate positions. Electing ORSO members as delegates to the DPO State Central Committee (SCC) and to the DPO 2nd Congressional District Committee (CD2) is a big goal because they aim to take over leadership of the SCC and CD2 in order to be in position to elect Our Revolution delegates to the Democratic National Convention in 2020, which will elect the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States.

    One of the tactics of ORSO, in my view, was to rewrite the Bylaws of the Jackson County Democratic Party to weaken the power of the chair of the party and put nearly all power in the hands of the Central Committee, which they accomplished at a series of meetings in late 2017 into April 2018 when the new Bylaws were adopted. It will be interesting to see what happens once an ORSO member or ally because chair. Will they then work to change the Bylaws to give the chair more powers? We’ll see.

    I count many friends among the members and allies of ORSO. I was active in the Rogue Valley chapter of Move to Amend and a supporter of Occupy Ashland some years ago with Andy Seles and others who are now ORSO members. [Deleted: Hallmark lists names of people he has worked with amicably.] I’m a strong supporter for Health Care for All Oregon. I voted for Bernie in the 2016 Oregon Primary and was a delegate to the DPO State Convention that elected Bernie delegates to the Democratic National Convention. But I’m certainly not pure enough for ORSO and its allies.
   

Photo by Dasja Dolan

   Over the last 14 years or so I have served the Jackson County Democratic Party in many capacities, always as a volunteer. I have been at various times Office Volunteer, Campaign Committee co-chair, newsletter editor, founder of the JCDP Facebook page and frequent contributor to it, delegate to the DPO 2nd Congressional Committee, delegate to the DPO State Central Committee and vice chair and chair of the JC Democratic Central Committee among other roles. I am a Grassroots Donor to the JCDP, giving monthly, and I always buy tickets to fundraisers if I’m going to be in town even though I’m far from being a rich guy.
   

   Serving this party as a volunteer has been one of the cornerstones of my volunteer life in retirement because I felt it was a great way to give back to our community, raise the consciousness of our community and to elect Democratic candidates who would fight for a clean environment & against climate change, support public education, social & economic justice & common spaces. In other words -- make our community, our state & our nation a better place to live.
   

  But I can no longer serve as a chair or vice chair of a standing committee of the JCDP or participate in the contentious debates that have characterized the Executive Committee & Central Committee meetings lately.
   

   I ask you, what kind of Democratic Party do you want in Jackson County? Do you want a Party that demands political purity of its members and leaders or a more inclusive Party that welcomes Hillary liberals as well as Bernie progressives? Do you want a Party that demands strict adherence to rules or one that allows members of committees to come forward with ideas and whose members listen first and ask questions later?  A Party that is raucous & rude to those who don’t hue to the ORSO line or a party that is courtesy and works out its differences without so much rancor and finger-pointing?
   

I’d love to hear your answers.

Allen Hallmark
Former Chair, JCD Neighborhood Leader Program