RALEIGH – Statesville attorney David Parker was elected chairman of the North Carolina Democratic Party on Saturday. He won by a solid margin of 355 votes over trial lawyer and state Rep. Bill Faison of Orange County, at 262 votes, and party activist Dannie Montgomery of Anson County, at 15 votes.
The votes came during a meeting of the Democratic Executive Committee at N.C. State University. Parker is one of North Carolina’s members of the Democratic National Committee. He was the campaign manager for Terry Sanford’s Senate campaign in 1992 and, later in the decade, the second-highest official in the party hierarchy.
His background seems to be a major reason Parker won the race to succeed outgoing chairman David Young. His chief opponent, Faison, is a well-known state legislator but not a veteran of grassroots politics. Parker argued that in order to recover from last year’s “shellacking,” Democrats needed not only to recruit and finance better candidates but also to rejuvenate party organizations at the precinct, county, and district levels.
Faison certainly didn’t ignore the issue. In fact, he touted the support of former chairman Gerry Meek, who presided over the state party during the Democratic glory days of 2006 and 2008 and is a hero to grassroots activists. Meek had won his own election for chairman by waging a successful bottom-up challenge to Ed Turlington, the pick of then-Gov. Mike Easley.
But Parker, whose electoral career consists of a stint on his local school board, said that what the Democrats needed was someone with long roots in party activism. He quipped that he had been “running for this office since I was five years old,” noting his service as a young coordinator for Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign 1976 and head of the state’s Young Democrats in the early 1980s.
I’m not surprised that Meek’s endorsement of Faison didn’t sway a majority of the party faithful. Party activists – be they Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, or others – tend to be a fractious lot. Most of them get into politics out of deep personal convictions about government. Most aren’t just glad-handers or job-seekers. They aren’t easy to convince or corral.
Both Parker and Faison said the recent tenure of Tom Fetzer as Republican chairman showed how a strong leader delivering a strong message can propel a state party to victory. Now that Parker has won the top job, however, I don’t expect him to try to fulfill quite the same role that Fetzer did for the GOP during 2009 and 2010.
Fetzer was state chairman of a party completely out of power in Raleigh and Washington. He needed to deliver the Republican message regularly and effectively. For his part, Parker will head a Democratic Party that has lost its more than a century of dominance in the General Assembly but still retains majorities in the state’s congressional delegation, the U.S. Senate, and statewide offices – including, most importantly, the governorship.
The same analysis explains why some Democratic critics of their outgoing chairman overstate their case. Perhaps David Young should have done some things differently at the party over the past two years, but he was never going to be the major spokesman for Democratic ideas or strategist for Democratic legislative races. Those roles belonged to Gov. Beverly Perdue, House Speaker Joe Hackney, and Senate leader Martin Nesbitt.
If Democrats believe a lack of effective messaging, candidate recruitment, and fundraising explains their legislative losses in 2010, those are the leaders who made the key decisions with which they disagree.
Furthermore, I would point out that the North Carolina Democratic Party did not dramatically underperform the national average in the recent elections. Republicans made large gains across the country. While the legislative losses were large, Democrats won three of the four heavily contested congressional races in North Carolina (largely by supporting Democratic incumbents who had voted against some of President Obama’s signature initiatives, such as his health care bill).
Parker has a tough job ahead of him. One thing Democrats could do to help him succeed would be to avoid fashioning unrealistic expectations about his role in coming political contests.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.