Rebuilding a party

All good men come to the aid of their party. At least that’s what I remember typing to test a newly installed typewriter ribbon.

That’s an inky strip that rolls around this cartridge and … well, never mind. It’s prehistoric.

Something that happened in modern times is that the Arkansas Democratic Party went broke. And a good man came to its aid.

It became laden with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, including to experts it required, such as lawyers and the financial-compliance people who could keep the party out of trouble with the Federal Election Commission.

Corporate donors were scarce, considering that Arkansas Democrats were becoming steadily more irrelevant with every cycle.

Donations from regular people … well, who were these regular people supposedly willing to donate to Arkansas Democrats? Was it the 65% of the electorate voting for Republicans or the 30% to 50% of the population not voting at all?

Some people started hitting up Grant Tennille, a smart business moderate and social liberal who had run economic development for Mike Beebe’s gubernatorial administration. They wanted him to come in and do … something. Please.

Then came the call from the man Tennille calls the “closer.”

That would be Beebe, who told him a tough job had to be done in the wreckage of the state Democratic Party and that he was just the one to do it.

“He said you’ve got to do it,” Tennille said.

“I think he may also have said you’d be crazy to do it.”

He did it because his governor told him there were no other choices, really, than for him to take the job and for Arkansas to have an actual Democratic Party — able even in its pitiably diminished political state to incur costs of operation and pay them.

Tennille waded in and soon asked about the possibility of taking bankruptcy. He was told political parties can’t file for that. He was told that the only thing to do was put a phone to his ear and raise money.

Tennille’s days were spent alone in the state party headquarters with door locked, begging for money on one line and answering the other if it rang.

Eventually, a few young people volunteered to do staff-like tasks and keep him company.

In the evenings, Tennille ventured around the state, meeting with county Democratic committees trying to rebuild a foundation and talk up the party.

He went to Washington to tell national Democratic officials that he had a really good candidate for governor, Chris Jones, and suggest that maybe the party could get him some help. None came. Tennille was telling me and others in September and October that Jones would get 40%, maybe 45%, and that the Democrats might gain a few legislative seats.

Was he spinning or believing? Yes, he said.

You can’t very well try to motivate by stressing your pitifulness.

Jones got 35%. Democrats lost legislative seats — down to 18 out of 100 in the House and six out of 35 in the Senate.

But there was this: Tennille had phoned his way to about $700,000. Debts were paid. The operating budget is in balance. There are four employees.

And both toilets at the state headquarters work. Tennille had fixed the internals of those — flappers, flushers, et al., then replaced the wax seals.

He could have called a plumber, but a trip to the do-it-yourself aisle was cheaper.

He’s resigning now, being tired, and no one blames him. Or should.

At the state committee meeting Saturday, Tennille noted — he says he didn’t mean to scold — that a majority of Democratic state committee members and county committee officers didn’t donate to the party. He said that had to change, either with an investment of money or hard work on the ground, if the Democrats are to survive as a functioning political party in Arkansas.

“I had one person tell me the party can’t win if it doesn’t raise more money,” Tennille told me. “I had another person tell me the party can’t raise money if it has no chance to win.

“I call that an impasse, and the only thing to do about it,” he said, was mobilize and go to the people who don’t vote and find out if it’s true, as Democrats hope and often maintain, that they’d vote Democratic if they voted.

It sounds important, then, that the Democrats get a good new chairman. I’m told to keep an eye on Megan Godfrey of Springdale, a former Democratic state representative with left-of-center sensibilities but a demonstrated ability in the General Assembly to forge bipartisan alliances for sensible causes, such as letting children brought here by undocumented immigrant parents get nurses’ licenses.

Republicans chose to redistrict Godfrey out of the Legislature. They must have thought she was worth the bother.