Tuesday afternoon I wrote a post asking some pointed questions about Marty Frost’s candidacy for DNC Chair. A number of readers wrote in assuming, not unreasonably perhaps, that those questions were really implied statements. They weren’t. They were meant as questions, the ones I think are most important for evaluating Frost’s candidacy. I won’t rehash the specifics; but if you’re interested you can read the first post here.
There’s a good bit of talk now that Frost was too friendly at this point or that to President Bush or that his track record is no good since he just lost his seat in Congress. But I don’t agree in either case.
The reason — the first, second, third and only reason — Frost got run out of Congress was because of Tom DeLay’s corrupt redistricting scheme from 2003. So that makes him less a loser than a martyr of a sort, though politics is a rough sport and that’s too grandiloquent and overwrought a phrase for what happened to him. Enough to say, that I don’t think it’s a black mark on him politically.
I would be less than candid if I didn’t say that Frost isn’t the candidate I’d most like to see win this, though I’m trying to keep an open mind. But he’s by no means the least either.
And as long as we’re on the subject, for all the supercilious nattering, this seems like a great list of candidates to run the DNC. Usually the whole choice isn’t even seriously canvassed among more than a few insiders. And the big contenders tend to be lobbyists and moneymen.
Not that I’m necessarily against either, in their place, mind you. But here, as near as I can see, are a group of candidates, most of whom have a clear argument and set of ideas about rebuilding, reshaping and generally toughening up the Democratic party. And most of them at least don’t seem to be in it — at least in any immediate sense — for the purposes of future rainmaking.
We could do far worse.
