Green Shoots of Democracy within the Philadelphia Democratic Party

By Karen Bojar

Drawing on the experiences of grassroots political activists from different socio- economic and ethnic backgrounds, Green Shoots of Democracy explores how self-identified progressives manage (or fail to manage) to work within a big city political machine. Although the book focuses on the work of progressives to foster democracy and transparency within the Philadelphia Democratic Party, lessons gleaned from their experiences are applicable beyond Philadelphia.







Americans have long had a history of volunteerism; however, grassroots partisan politics is often not considered a worthy volunteer endeavor—not as worthy as, for example, working in a homeless shelter or a literacy center. Green Shoots of Democracy argues for a more democratic, transparent party structure—one that is sorely needed to counter the widespread perception that electoral politics is dirty business rather than an honorable civic project.

• Language: English
• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781631521423

Karen Bojar

Dr. Karen Bojar is Professor Emerita of English and women’s studies at the Community College of Philadelphia. She is a longtime Democratic Party activist and has served as a Democratic committeeperson for the past thirty years. She also has a long history as a feminist activist and served as President of the Philadelphia chapter of the National Organization for Women from 2001–2009. She continues to be involved in Philadelphia NOW and in Philadelphia politics and was recently appointed to the Mayor’s Commission for Women. Bojar has written numerous articles on feminist activism, and is the co-editor of Teaching Feminist Activism (Routledge, 2002); she also recently published Feminism in Philadelphia: The Glory Years, 1968–1982, which interweaves the history of feminism in Philadelphia with the broad themes and trajectory of the “second wave” feminist movement.

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Introduction

As someone who has spent almost three decades working as a Democratic committeeperson, it has become increasingly clear to me that building a progressive base within the Democratic Party will require democratizing the too often undemocratic Democratic Party. Although my focus is how this plays out in the Philadelphia Democratic Party, and secondarily the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, the problem extends beyond Pennsylvania.

I have not attempted to write a complete analysis of the Philadelphia Democratic Party’s ward and committee structure. Instead, I explore how progressives have worked within a structure often not supportive of their efforts to foster democracy and transparency within the Democratic Party. Progressive is a slippery term meaning different things to different people, and some attempt at defining it is in order. It is generally thought to mean commitment to: 1) individual rights for racial, ethnic and religious minorities, for women, and for lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgendered persons; 2) economic redistribution through a robust safety net and progressive taxation; 3) protecting the rights of all citizens to participate in the democratic process. Although there is general agreement among progressives on core issues, there is much less agreement about priorities and about the trade-offs that may be necessary to advance those priorities.

For some progressives active in the Democratic Party, commitment to democratic processes unfortunately does not extend to internal party democracy. Such progressives are usually older and often from politically active families with long-standing connections to political machines. These machine progressives are part of the reason some members of the progressive community see working within the Democratic Party as a hopelessly compromised endeavor. Some progressives have turned instead to small alternative parties such as the Green Party, and many more have devoted their energies to community activism. Americans have long had a history of volunteerism; however, grassroots partisan politics is often not considered a worthy volunteer endeavor, like working in a homeless shelter or a literacy center. A more democratic, transparent Democratic Party structure would go a long way to counter the notion that electoral politics is essentially dirty business rather than an honorable civic project.

I explore some of the reasons why people who identify as liberals or progressives become involved in the Democratic Party as committeepersons (Chapter 1); the nature of the Philadelphia ward system, in which there are only a handful of transparent/democratic wards, many undemocratic top-down wards and many variations in between (Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5); the special challenges faced by progressive ward leaders in a system which provides little support for their efforts (Chapter 6), and by progressive committeepersons in undemocratic wards in which they have few, if any, allies (Chapter 7). I also describe recent events that exposed the Democratic Party machine’s willingness to condone undemocratic processes, and the efforts of progressives on the local and state levels to work for a more democratic, transparent Democratic Party (Chapters 8 and 9). I analyze how a resurgence of progressive activity, a nascent pro-democracy movement within the Democratic Party, played out in the 2014 committeeperson races, and some of the challenges that a reinvigorated ward and committee structure must address (Chapter 10). Finally, I analyze the impact of the emerging pro-democracy movement on the 2015 municipal elections (Chapter 11), the role of the committeeperson as community educator (Chapter 12), and what the election of Mayor Jim Kenney might mean for the future of the Philadelphia Democratic Party (Chapter 13).

The progressive ward leaders I interviewed, past and present, have struggled with the challenge of creating open, democratic wards within a structure often hostile to such efforts. It can be argued that the Philadelphia Democratic Party machine is a shadow of its former self and that it can best be understood as a group of often competing machines rather than as a monolith. Nonetheless, even in its weakened state, the Party machine still has an infrastructure of ward leaders and committeepersons. Changing that infrastructure, although a long, slow process, is arguably easier than building a competing structure. And there will be opportunities for significant change. The party is currently staffed by ward leaders and committeepersons already in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. The current configuration cannot last much longer.

When I was a young woman, I saw working in social movements and working in electoral politics as mutually exclusive choices, with electoral politics as clearly the lesser choice. I see it differently now and agree with political scientist Frances Fox Piven’s analysis: Elections and movements do not proceed on separate tracks. To the contrary, electoral politics creates the environment in which movements arise.¹ Or, to put it somewhat differently, significant political change in the United States has usually resulted from social movements pushing from the outside and political allies simultaneously working inside the legislative and executive branches of government.

Recently, with the Occupy movement that erupted in 2011, we have seen how social movements can influence the debate in the electoral arena. Although the Occupy movement appears to have faded away, the anger it unleashed has not dissipated; its focus on economic inequality contributed to framing the political debate in the 2012 presidential election and beyond. With the Black Lives Matter movement, we may be on the cusp of a powerful new social movement addressing racial injustice and economic inequality.

I am sometimes asked: given the recent successes of the Working Families Party in New York, why put all this energy into changing the Democratic Party? If I lived in another state—New York, for example—I might have made another choice. New York is a relatively third-party-friendly state. It allows fusion balloting, which means that a third party can have a major party candidate on its ballot. To take one example, a candidate like New York Mayor Bill De Blasio was listed on both the Democratic Party ballot and the Working Families ballot. Thus the De Blasio victory added to the vote totals of the Working Families Party (WFP) as well as to those of the Democratic Party. The WFP website describes the advantages of fusion voting, which can build a third party movement while avoiding the trap of being a spoiler:

When you go to vote, you’ll see the same candidate listed under multiple parties on the ballot—say Democrat and Working Families. Voting for that candidate under Working Families counts the same as voting for them under the Democratic Party line—but it also lets them know that you expect them to fight for the issues we care about.

Candidates know how many votes they got from Working Families voters, and when those votes help them win, we can expect that politician to fight for us, not special interests.²

However, I live in Pennsylvania, where rules are clearly designed to buttress the two-party system, thus making the building of an alternative to the Democratic Party a much more daunting task.

We are unlikely to have fusion voting in Pennsylvania any time in the near future, given the 1997 Supreme Court ruling permitting states to bar fusion voting.³ Working Families Party leader Dan Cantor has acknowledged the challenge of duplicating the successes WFP had in New York in those states that do not allow fusion voting; however, Cantor now thinks that fusion voting is not essential to the creation of a progressive electoral force: The Tea Party proved we were wrong… They yanked the Republican Party to the right without being a separate party. We realized that most of our power in New York comes from our work in Democratic primaries. We [the WFP] don’t have to be on the ballot.⁴

In New York, the WFP built a progressive caucus within the Democratic Party—what many now refer to as the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party. According to Cantor, the Tea Party understood that you disrupt and then you electoralize. We will fail if there aren’t strong community and environmental and youth movements in America. But they will fail if they can’t figure out how their values and issues become part of the legislative and electoral process. That’s where a group like the Working Families Party has a role to play.⁵

In some states, building a third party that fields its own candidates might make sense; in other states (like Pennsylvania), ballot access rules are a real disincentive. There’s another disincentive for me as a Philadelphian—I live in a city dominated by the Democratic Party, which enjoys a roughly seven-to-one voter registration edge. Granted, there are a few limited opportunities for a party such as the Working Families Party, thanks to rules assuring at least two minority-party at-large representatives in City Council; however, Philadelphia’s contested elections for local officials and for state and congressional representatives generally occur within the Democratic primary.⁶ And the link between the average voter and the Democratic Party—reminding voters of upcoming elections, providing information about the candidates and the issues—has been in most neighborhoods the Democratic committeeperson.

Unfortunately, in many neighborhoods in Philadelphia, that link no longer exists. As long-term committeepersons retire, all too often they are not replaced. Many young people don’t see the value of electoral participation, and they move too frequently to develop a base restricted to a particular neighborhood. It hasn’t been easy to encourage young progressives to register as Democrats (rather than as independents or Greens) and build a progressive base within the Democratic Party. The share of independents in the electorate, which long ago surpassed the percentages of either Democrats or Republicans, continues to increase. According to a Gallup poll, 42% of Americans identified as independents in 2013, the highest number reported since Gallup began conducting interviews 25 years ago. Republican identification fell to 25%; Democratic identification fell to 31%.⁷ Among young voters the number of independents was reported at 50% in 2014.⁸

The perceived corruption and the top-down organizational model of many wards make the Democratic Party an unattractive option for many idealistic young people. The undemocratic culture turns off the very kinds of people who, if involved, might open up the process and build what the late Senator Paul Wellstone called the democratic wing of the Democratic Party—progressive in terms of issues, as well as in commitment to fair, transparent, democratic processes.

While many progressives have disdained building a base within the Democratic Party, the radical right saw building a base within the Republican Party as the way to power. In the 1980s, political analysts were remarking on the skill with which what was then called the New Right focused on the grassroots—the party infrastructure at the precinct level as well as low-profile local offices such as school board elections. Most progressives could see the logic here, but relatively few actually got involved on this level. The right-wing focus on electoral politics continues as the Tea Party, the 21st century incarnation of the radical right, has wasted no time getting its members elected to political office. Countering the values and policies the Tea Party represents involves just such dedication to the unglamorous work of building a progressive infrastructure at the grassroots.

The Obama campaign demonstrated the importance of door-to-door, in-person contact with voters. Yes, the campaign’s sophisticated analytics provided campaign workers with tools to identify and knock on the doors of those voters most persuadable and those most likely to need a nudge to go the polls, but in the end it came down to old fashioned door-to-door organizing. According to Jonathan Alter: Like the ward heelers of old who knew a lot about their neighbors when they rang their doorbells, Obama field organizers, armed with the fruits of Big Data, could bring a presidential campaign to the front porch as never before.⁹

I recall when I was going door-to-door in the 2008 presidential election, some of my neighbors told me that Obama volunteers had been in the neighborhood and were going door-to-door. I wondered why they hadn’t stopped at my house. Then the light bulb flashed—they knew they didn’t need to. Their data told them how best to use their volunteers. And from all accounts, the 2012 campaign was an even more sophisticated operation, precisely targeting those voters most likely to be responsive to persuasion. However, national campaigns are not a permanent presence in a neighborhood, and can’t possibly replace the reliable committeeperson who knows the neighborhood terrain and is out there every election reminding neighbors to vote and providing the information they need to cast informed votes.

The Democratic Party has benefited from demographic shifts in the composition of the electorate, changes that made the Obama victory possible. But unfortunately for Democrats, the voters who made up the Obama coalition—young people, racial and ethnic minorities, low-income voters—are not reliable voters in off-year elections. The Republican base is increasingly comprised of elderly white voters who faithfully turn up in non-presidential year elections. And the Republicans have reaped the rewards of a reliable base—control of state legislatures, which gave them control of the redistricting process in key states, resulting in a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Despite the fact that, in 2012, 59,214,910 voters chose Democratic candidates and 57,622,827 voters chose Republicans, Democrats won 201 House seats while the Republicans won 234, thus gaining control of the House.¹⁰ The decision of many 2008 Obama voters to sit out the 2010 midterms had serious consequences. The same scenario has played out in the 2014 midterm elections.

Reinvigorating the committeeperson structure is one way of trying to counter the tendency of the Democratic base to sit out non-presidential-year elections. If combined with efforts to make voting easier (e.g. early voting, online registration, same day registration), the composition of the electorate is likely to tilt more in the direction of the Democratic base. However, for many young people and low-income people, their failure to vote is due not simply to lacking access to early voting or to no one’s having reminded them. For some, there is deep disaffection with the political process, a pervasive sense that politicians can’t or won’t deliver for them.

However, if voting is made easier, it is likely that a higher percentage of the Democratic base will vote—this could mean more Democrats winning in general elections and more progressive Democrats winning in primaries. Although increasing turnout in general elections is thought to work to the advantage of Democrats and is welcomed by virtually all Democrats, increasing turnout in primary elections is not necessarily what many incumbent Democrats would like to see.

The low turnout in primary elections has worked to the advantage of the Democratic incumbent-protection machine. Party machines can turn out a reliable core of loyalists who comprise a disproportionate share of the primary electorate, thus making it very difficult for progressive challengers to prevail. If, as a consequence of making voting easier, turnout increases and more progressive candidates are elected, we might start a virtuous cycle with increasing numbers of the disaffected seeing value in political participation. (A lot of hypotheticals there, I realize.)

Historically, economic elites have always understood that voting was a potentially powerful weapon in the hands of low-income voters, and frequently were not reluctant to say so. Historian Terry Golway quotes an 1877 editorial in New York’s Commercial and Financial Chronicle: [White Southerners] have…an ignorant class to deal with, as we have here. The problem in both cases was the power of suffrage.¹¹ Unfortunately, low-income voters have not always understood their potential power. In the 19th century there were powerful political machines mobilizing immigrant working-class voters, and in the 20th century a powerful social movement, the Civil Rights Movement, organizing African-American voters. Now we have neither powerful party machines nor inspirational social movements.

In this challenging political climate, one remedy for low voter turnout is organizing civic-minded volunteers to run for committeeperson who then mobilize the voters in their neighborhoods. Convincing more people to devote their volunteer energy to increasing political participation will require a political structure that is more democratic and more transparent. Those motivated to do this work out of a commitment to civic engagement will not want to be mere obedient foot soldiers taking their marching orders from some ward leader. If they are going to get involved, they will want a voice in how their local party is run. A reinvigoration of the grassroots will necessarily require reform of the ward structure—a long-term project.

I hope that my account of how I stumbled into grassroots electoral politics and gradually became committed to the work might encourage others to make a similar commitment, and that useful lessons can be learned from the experience of the progressive ward leaders and committeepersons I’ve interviewed—activists who have struggled for years to democratize the Philadelphia Democratic Party. Although this book is intended primarily for self-identified liberals and progressives, I believe that civic life would be greatly improved if more citizens—however they identify politically—got involved in grassroots politics to encourage voter participation in their neighborhoods and a voice for committeepersons in the ward structure.

I did not see grassroots electoral politics as critically important work during my early years as a committeeperson, but I have since come to view it as such. Yes, there is still that little voice in the back of my head: Working within the Democratic Party? Is it worth it? And the Philadelphia Democratic Party does test my faith. Although my focus is on how this all plays out in my city, my analysis of the opportunities and the obstacles to be overcome is applicable far beyond Philadelphia.

Chapter One

The Accidental Committeeperson

I became a Democratic committeeperson in Philadelphia in 1986, probably the same way most people become committeepersons. Ron Williams, my neighbor and the committeeperson in my division, knocked on my door and asked me if I would be interested in taking the place of the current committeeperson who was moving out of the division.

When I was a young anti-war, anti-racism activist in the late 1960s and 1970s, if someone had told me that I would spend almost thirty years of my life as a Democratic committeeperson, I would have been incredulous. And I certainly would not have expected to be winding up my activist career writing a book encouraging others to do likewise. For me, the wake-up call came with the election of Ronald Reagan. It really did matter who won elections. This may not seem like a major revelation to most people, but it was for me.

If I had received Ron Williams’ invitation prior to the 1980 presidential election, I’m sure I would have turned it down without a moment’s hesitation. As someone who came of age in the 1960s, I shared the distrust of many in my generation for electoral politics and viewed choosing between Democrats and Republicans as choosing between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. My first vote for president was cast in 1968 for Dick Gregory, of the Peace and Freedom Party; I thought I was too radical to get involved with the hopelessly compromised Democratic Party. I did not want to settle for piecemeal reform, or engage in the messy compromises that are part and parcel of participation in the electoral arena. But somehow, despite this distrust of the major political parties, I always voted. I think I never missed an election—although I admit my faulty memory may not be accurate here.

My predilection for voting was not widely shared among most of the left-wing activists I associated with in the 1960s and early 1970s. I was stunned that, at the left-wing counter-inaugural demonstration in 1969, a group of women identified with the radical strand of the Women’s Liberation Movement burned their voter registration cards, declaring that suffragism, which they claimed had vitiated the earlier wave of feminism, was dead and that a new movement for genuine liberation was underway.¹² They actually asked the legendary suffragist Alice Paul if she would join them in giving back the vote. Alice Paul reportedly hit the ceiling.¹³ As someone who had devoted her life to the struggle for suffrage, had been jailed and endured a hunger strike, Alice Paul was not sympathetic to the contention that voting was a mockery of democracy. In her account of the incident, feminist historian Alice Echols makes the sweeping generalization: To women’s liberationists who had acquired their political education in the Civil Rights movement and the new left, voting was a mockery of democracy.¹⁴ Echols surely exaggerates, but the distrust of participation in electoral politics, especially participation in the Democratic or Republican Parties, ran deep among progressive/feminist groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Philadelphians in those years had a reason not to burn their voter registration cards. His name was Frank Rizzo, the Police Commissioner and later Mayor with a reputation for brutality and hostility to blacks, lesbians and gays, hippies, and anti-war protesters. Opposition to Rizzo was a galvanizing force among progressives, with electoral politics and social movement politics closely intertwined in Philadelphia in the 1970s. African-Americans (many of whom had been involved in the Civil Rights Movement) and feminists (usually under the banner of the Philadelphia Women’s Political Caucus) organized against the Democratic machine, fighting for inclusion and fair representation as elected officials and as Democratic Party ward leaders and committeepersons. Although I considered it important to cast a vote against Rizzo, at that stage in my life, the idea of becoming a cog in the Democratic Party machine was not an appealing prospect.

I may have found my way to grassroots Democratic Party politics eventually, but if it hadn’t been for that knock on my door in 1986 it probably would have happened much later. Very few people wake up one day and decide they would like to run for committeeperson. Most people I interviewed and who responded to my committeeperson survey reported being recruited by a neighbor. The survey was distributed through my networks, and certainly was not a random, scientific sample; but rather intended to provide a snapshot of the motivations and experiences of progressives who became committeepersons. Although national politics was often the initial reason for political involvement, it was most often being approached by a committeeperson in the neighborhood that led to political interest taking this local turn. Former 9th Ward leader Rich Chapman describes his involvement, which follows this trajectory from the national to the local:

I got into politics in St. Louis, Missouri through the anti-war movement. I was very active organizing buses to Washington and ended up as a spokesman and when we moved back to Philadelphia I got involved in the McGovern campaign right away and ended up being the coordinator for eastern Pennsylvania for the primary and for the general election.

I was always very interested in politics and then got a job as the Executive Director of ADA [Americans for Democratic Action] and learned there was an opening for a committeeman in my division. I was a committeeperson for a couple of years and there was some kind of discontent with the ward leader that I was not a party to. Stuff like that always seemed to me like petty bickering. So then this group of malcontents came to me and asked me to run for ward leader because I wasn’t part of the bickering.¹⁵

27th Ward leader Carol Jenkins followed a similar path from national to local politics:

I entered the picture in way similar to what Rich said—except that it was the George Bush era. I was so upset by his election that I thought I would get more involved. I was always peripherally involved wherever I lived, but I had never gotten involved in the nitty-gritty of ward politics until then. I got involved in Move-on and Neighborhood Networks and I met [27th Ward committeeperson] Mary Goldman at one of those meetings and she asked me if I would have any interest in getting involved in the ward and I was so enraged at what was taking place nationally and I was in a situation in which I had a little bit more time as well to get involved. So I got involved as a committeeperson and later became ward leader.¹⁶

The publicity surrounding national campaigns is often what galvanizes people, and through those campaigns, volunteers meet local activists. For many, the connection with local activists is critical before taking the step to run for committeeperson. Former 8th Ward leader Stephanie Singer described becoming interested in politics while working on the John Kerry campaign; through the campaign she met local 8th Ward committeepersons who encouraged her to get involved in the ward. The opportunity to have a direct impact (albeit on a small scale) is often what keeps people engaged in ward politics.

Certainly, having an impact on the political choices of my neighbors was the main reason I became involved and remain involved thirty years later. I soon discovered I liked the job of committeeperson. Unlike my other volunteer projects (at the time I was Co-Chair of Parents Union for Public Schools), the committeeperson job had clear boundaries. There was a great deal of work on Election Day twice a year and the weekend before the election. There were also ward meetings about eight times a year, but this volunteer job didn’t threaten to take over my life, as did my job as Co-Chair of Parents Union.

Over the years, my involvement in civic and advocacy organizations such as Parents Union for Public Schools and the National Organization for Women (NOW) began to merge with my work in electoral politics. I increasingly saw electoral politics as a way to advance a progressive agenda. Much of the literature on civic participation treats such activism as distinct from involvement in grassroots politics. In general, it is political scientists who study involvement in grassroots politics, and sociologists who study participation in civic organizations. In the lives of grassroots political activists, however, the two kinds of involvement are far from distinct, and many political activists view their political work and their civic involvement as essentially one project with many areas of overlap.

Beginning in