Inside the Alabama Democrats' 5-point comeback plan

Can Mark Kennedy lead the Alabama Democratic Party out of the wilderness?
That’s the question facing the former state Supreme Court Justice as he takes on one of the most daunting tasks in American politics.
Kennedy was elected chairman of the state party in January after no one else sought the job. The party that once dominated Alabama politics was split by internal rivalries, burned by corruption scandals involving some of its most high-profile members and thoroughly rejected by voters as a Republican wave swept across the South.
The GOP won every statewide office on the November ballot and captured control of the state Legislature for the first time in 136 years.
While Democrats were licking their wounds, Republicans steamrolled ahead with construction of a permanent majority. First came legislation that broke the Alabama Education Association, a Democratic powerhouse. Up next: The redrawing of congressional and legislative districts.
Kennedy, 58, a Greenville native, said he still wonders if his job is the opportunity of a lifetime or a fool’s errand. But he’s spent the last three months planning a revival, and now he’s ready to preach.
“There’s no time in the history of our state — except maybe in the ’60s — when being a Democrat was more important,” Kennedy said Monday over dinner at the Captain’s Table restaurant on the Causeway. “I’ve never seen a time when so many things we value are under attack.”
Kennedy knows his history. His father-in-law was the late Gov. George C. Wallace, and Kennedy held elected office for more than two decades, culminating with an 11-year stint on the state Supreme Court. He retired in 2009.
The first step for Kennedy: Admit defeat. Kennedy said Alabama voters spoke clearly in the last election.
“But they didn’t just speak in Alabama,” he said. “They spoke all over the country. If you look from Texas to Georgia, every Southern state suffered the same consequences. Democrats were swept out of office in all of the Deep South.”
But it was not just an issue of geography, he said.
“A lot of it had to do with a philosophy of dividing us on racial grounds,” he said. “That’s so much a part of what Southern politics used to be. And if we don’t stem the tide, that’s what it’s going to be again. That’s the war we’re fighting in Alabama, and we can’t afford to lose.”
Five keys
The five keys to Kennedy’s game plan for a Democratic resurgence:

• 1. Define the message.

Kennedy said Republicans can rattle off their core issues by rote — “low taxes, less government, strong military, more patriotic, on and on.” And, he said, they have a powerful vehicle to communicate their message: “The worst thing going for Democrats in America is Fox News,” he said.
“How many times have you gone in the drug store or the dentist, and they have it on? They’ve got their talking points down pat, and they are being broadcast all over the country every day,” he said. “What we’re not doing in Alabama — and I can’t really talk about nationally — we don’t have that same five-finger test. We don’t have a strong, understandable message.”
Kennedy said Democrats have allowed Republicans to seize the mantle of patriotism. It’s time, he said, to get it back.
“My oldest son will deploy to Afghanistan on Friday,” Kennedy said. “Don’t tell me that my wife and I don’t love our son and love this country and believe in the mission he’s serving.”

• 2. Restructure.

Kennedy’s plan is to tear a page from the Alabama Republican Party’s playbook, decentralizing party leadership and putting more resources in the hands of county chapters.
“There are Democratic leaders in all 67 counties. There are volunteers in all 67 counties. What you haven’t seen from the state party is a call to action, beginning at the county level,” he said.
“If there’s a paradigm I want to shift — we may never be able to fund a party structure like our Republican friends can. But we can build a grassroots organization that is robust and effective.”

• 3. Embrace Obama.

“Next year, we’re going to be proud to stand by Barack Obama as our nominee,” Kennedy said. “He is a good president. He is a good Democrat. And he’s worthy of consideration — more importantly, he’s worthy of our praise.”
Kennedy said Alabama Democrats only hurt themselves by joining Obama’s chorus of conservative critics.
“Mobile is a good example,” he said. “How much (federal) money would you lose if you ran against the president, and he turned on you? How much money could you get if you had a congressman here who was a Democrat and a friend of the administration? We need to think strategically about what it means to support a strong president.”

• 4. A pox on party switchers.

Kennedy said he’s made it a personal crusade to recruit candidates to run against every elected official who switched parties after the last election. To that end, he’s already reserved a website — PartySwitchers.com — designed to identify turncoats.
“I couldn’t believe somebody hadn’t already bought it,” he said. “So now it’s owned by the Alabama Democratic Party. We’re going to bring it up in full flower, and we’re going to show everybody who the party switchers are. And they will have a big ol’ bullseye on them. Those are the people we’re going to vote out of office.”

• 5. Fight.

Kennedy said Alabama Republicans are pushing “an onslaught of Draconian legislation ... that is driven by hate, fear and anger.”
If that isn’t enough to motivate Democrats, he said, “then we need to find something else to do.” And he said the GOP’s margin of victory was not as wide as most believe.
“We need a 17 percent swing to turn it our way,” he said. “That is no mandate. That is no landslide. If (state Sen.) Lowell Barron had gotten five more votes in every precinct in his district, he’d have been re-elected. We could have had those five votes if we’d had a solid grassroots organization.”
Kennedy joked that Democrats “may be liberals, but we’ve got to be smart. We may be happy, but we’ve got to get mean. I will do whatever it takes to get us there — first of all, to prove to myself that I can do it, but also because I believe we owe it to the people of this state.”