Youth is served: Time for the Democratic Spring here in Floyd County?

The Floyd County Democratic Party just got a lot younger ... in terms of its leadership, at least. As the incoming chairman Adam Dickey explains:

I'm honored to have been elected as your Floyd County Democratic Chairman during (Saturday's) Central Committee reorganization election. Congratulations to Vice Chair Stacy Deck, Secretary Sarah Bonifer, and Treasurer Shane Shane L. Gibson. Together, we look forward to building our party over the next four years in Floyd County. I'd also like to that retiring Chairman John Wilcox, Secretary Tony Toran, and Treasurers Douglas England and Sam Locke for all their hard work over the past several year. I am proud to be a Floyd County Democrat!

In various announcements referencing the leadership contest outcome, I saw no mention of Official Liaison to the Antebellum Dixiecrat Wing of the party, but perhaps he or she is on the down low. Maybe they've finally moved away, died or switched parties.

Whatever.

So, will new and refreshed management alone be capable of propelling the party into the 1990s?

(One step at a time, please; calendars are chronological, after all)

Until tangible evidence of progress is seen, and while sincerely wishing the very best to the party's new leaders, I must fall back on these words.

The (local Democratic Party's) platform is invisible. It is a gaping chasm divided between equal parts impotence and vacuity, one that has led us to the current doltish impasse, whereby almost every elected city office is held by a card-carrying Democrat, and yet we suffer perpetual gridlock as the party stands by, mute, impassive, and apparently suffocating from the electoral delusion that having Bob Caesar as a “Democrat” is somehow useful to civilization in the broader sense, and for their own organizational prospects in the narrower one.

And so, faced with a local Democratic Party seemingly unable to reinvent itself, shall independents and contrarians like me grimace and give a second look to the Republicans and Dave Matthews for … um … er … well … on second thought, not at all.

There simply aren’t enough showers and cigarettes available to make that feeling of grimy dirtiness go away, and so inescapably, depressingly, I return to Square One. In the past, I’ve always rationalized my local voting choices by paraphrasing a Republican, Honest Abe Lincoln:

If I could defeat these Republicans without voting for any Democrat I would do it, and if I could defeat them by voting for all the Democrats I would do it; and if I could defeat them by voting for some Democrats and leaving others alone I would also do that.

They just don't make Republicans like Abe any longer. Regrettably, hereabouts, they seem not to be making Democrats in any recognizable form whatever. Bizarrely, I suppose it won’t stop me from voting for some and perhaps even all of them, while holding my breath – yet again.