Alabama Democrats: A Big Tent, Or...

My friend Ivan is grumpy. Living in Alabama might be reason enough, but today he has to cope with this (link expires at midnight 8/30):

By BOB JOHNSON

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - Democratic Party leaders want a former candidate for attorney general who denies the Holocaust occurred to stay out of their future primaries.

The party's executive committee passed a resolution Saturday informing Larry Darby that "he is not welcome in the Alabama Democratic Party."

Darby, the founder of the Atheist Law Center, responded by saying the vote shows that the state party's leadership is "intellectually and morally bankrupt."

Apparently Darby got 43 percent of the vote in a primary for attorney general. Ivan says:

The AP should have made clear that most Alabamians didnt know Darby's racist, anti-semitic positions, or that he then headed [the atheist center].. … Darby got 99 percent of his vote because Democrats didn’t know what he stood for, not because they knew what he stood for.

Haven’t heard from Ivan yet on this (from the NYT):

By SHAILA DEWAN

Published: August 27, 2006

A woman who stands to become Alabama’s first openly gay elected official is back on the November ballot after the Democratic Party’s state committee on Saturday overturned a decision to disqualify her.

The candidate, Patricia Todd, who won a runoff to become the Democratic nominee for state legislator in a central Birmingham district, was disqualified Thursday on the grounds that she had failed to file a campaign finance report with the state party chairman, even though candidates have not done so since 1988.

The subcommittee that met Thursday disqualified her opponent in the primary, Gaynell Hendricks, for the same reason. There is no Republican candidate in the district, whose registered voters are majority black by a slim margin. Ms. Todd is white; Ms. Hendricks, whose mother-in-law brought the challenge, is black.

The subcommittee that disqualified the candidates was controlled by Joe Reed, a powerful black Democrat, who had urged voters to support Ms. Hendricks and warned that if they did not, the district could be redrawn to be majority white.

But the disqualification was met with disapproval. The party’s chairman, Joseph Turnham, said he was disappointed, and an editorial in The Birmingham News asked if the party had a “death wish.”