To my amazement, three weeks ago, MyDD diarist Lutton actually posted a diary about my ward. The diary linked to a Daily News article that provides some background on why the Democratic activists in my neighborhood felt it was time to recall our current ward leader: There is a lot more to the story than all this, including many twists and turns with which, as I newbie, I am not entirely familiar. I first met Mary Goldman in March at a save Social Security event, and Don Engel in July at a Neighborhood Networks meeting. I did not meet Nancy Ruane, the acting ward leader, until October, when I first attended a ward meeting. While I cannot tell this story as well as these and other local activists can, I can praise for the remarkable rays of hope that they are. If the party is to be freed from the grip of Unreformed Democrats,, these will be the sort people who will do it.

As Congressmen Brady noted in the above article, there is indeed a formal procedure to remove a ward leader from office. In accordance with that procedure, the following petition was distributed to every member of the 27th Ward committee on November 15th

The petition was only a small part of the task, however. In accordance with the above mentioned 1954 rules, in order for the recall to succeed, it was necessary for two-thirds of the existing committeepeople to vote in favor of the recall at a meeting called by the ward committee for the expressed purpose of recalling the ward leader. This required actually tracking down every member of the ward committee, including those members who officially listed as committeepeople but were either inactive or no longer performing their duties.

Thus, before the meeting began, Nancy produced the resignation letters of seven or eight committeepeople who had moved out of the district and were no longer registered to vote there (the 27th ward includes three colleges, so there is a lot of local turnover). I do not know how she and others had managed to track these people and / or their information down, but this was one of the keys not only for the recall to succeed, but also to better map the currently active Democrats in the ward. The result was that while the official Democratic Party records showed 25 or 26 committeepeople, for perhaps the first time in years we were able to produce a fully up to date list of local Democratic activists. I cannot emphasize how important this information is, and how difficult it is to come by. Producing lists of this sort around the nation is perhaps the number one obstacle to a total revolution in Democratic politics nationwide. In Ward 27, we finally did it.

Once we had this list, it was also important that we had an election lawyer available to help us. In this case, the lawyer we found was also the former chair of the Chester County Democratic Party out in the suburbs. He was able to slowly walk us through the entire procedure that was laid out in the above mentioned 1954 rules. I do not image that such a resource will be available to most people attempting to clean up their local democratic Party. Access to, and understand of, the official rules of local Democratic Parties remains a second major obstacle to cleaning up the Democratic Party nationwide.

Once the meeting was moving, what I saw was truly remarkable. Time was allotted for debate, and several people from the neighborhood spoke up to say what a said day this was for them. While sometimes it is easy to think of Ward Leaders as faceless party bosses that only work as cogs in a machine, many people emphasized how for a long time Kevin had been a friend of theirs. That was how he came to rise to Ward Leader--he was, for a while, active in the local community, and he had been a good friend of many other local activists. This was the purest form of democracy I had ever witnessed. Friends and neighbors had gathered to discuss a matter that was perhaps only relevant to their local neighborhood. Their decisions were based not on some abstract ideology, or multi-million dollar ad buys funded by wealthy donors. Their decision was based purely on their own experience, and what they believed was the right thing to do based on that experience. I have never felt more proud of where I lived than I did last Tuesday night.

The result of the meeting was that, by a vote of 15-0, Kevin Fassett was recalled as Ward Leader. With only 18 active committeepeople at the start of the meeting, this was more than the two-thirds majority we needed for the recall to take place. After that meeting was adjurned, a new meeting was immediately called to nominate a new Ward Leader. Two people were nominated, Nancy Ruane and Jackie Owens (Jackie actually was the person who nominated Nancy. I think she voted for Nancy as well). Nancy won what I believe was a close vote, and Jackie was then immediately and unanimously voted in as committee chair, which is the second highest position in the ward. Several other positions were also filled. Toward the end of the meeting, I was appointed committeeperson for the 23rd division, and someone else was appointed as a new committeeperson for, I believe, the 20th division.

And that was it. It was democracy in action. It was taking the party back, in action. The decisions were made by those who showed up. Whenever I refer to Democrats from now on, I can proudly and justifiably use the first person plural, rather than the third person we see all too often in the blogosphere. It amazes me to think that it was not even all that long ago that I wasn't registered as a Democrat, and I didn't even know what a ward was. When I decided to run for ommitteeperson back in July, my main justification was that no one from the Democratic Party had ever contacted me about any election in the nearly seven years I had lived in Ward 27. Now, along with Carol, I will be the person in charge of making sure local voters are contacted, registered, and brought to the polls. Like so many others, I have been swept up in the national tidal wave of progressive reform over the last two years. We have taken our Ward back. Soon, we will take back the entire county party. From there, the sky is the limit. If we have people doing this everywhere in the country, it will not be long before progressives and Democrats are the natural governing coalition of America once again. Today is a bright new day, and it is a beautiful day in my neighborhood. Make it one in your neighborhood too.