The bizarre plight of Chris Gates

I was intrigued by an item Ed Kilgore raised yesterday about the intra-party fight going on in Colorado about the future of the Dem Party leadership in the state. The more I look into this, the more bizarre it looks.

Like Ed, I kind of assumed Colorado Dems would be basking in their own success right now. The historically-Republican state showed remarkable “Blue” tendencies last year, with a key Senate victory (Ken Salazar), House victory (John Salazar), and a sweep of the state legislature. With Mark Udall already considered the frontrunner for the state’s 2006 Senate race, and the governor’s race looking encouraging, you’d think Colorado Dems would be giving each other high fives. Instead, they’re giving each other the finger.

Chris Gates has been the state party chair through this tremendously successful period, and has won national praise for the party’s victories. Indeed, other state chairs have asked Gates how they can repeat his success in their own states. How was Gates rewarded? The state party’s executive committee fired him, replacing him with a largely unknown environmental activist named Pat Waak.

The whole thing has become something of a fiasco, including the vote itself. Denver Democratic consultant, and former Howard Dean campaign manager, Rick Ridder said the controversy surrounding Colorado’s Democratic chair has “all the atmospherics of a high school election for class president.”

Waak beat Gates by only three votes out of 400 cast, but seven proxy votes, which would have meant a Gates victory, weren’t counted. Then, Waak said she’d bring the party together, right before she literally changed the locks on headquarters’ doors.

And then there’s the reason some party activists wanted Gates out in the first place.

According to press reports, the coup against Gates was basically an act of revenge by “activists” unhappy with his less-than-secret support of Salazar in his Senate primary against fellow-activist Mike Miles. Presumably, Gates’ perfidious maneuvering, in tandem with virtually everybody in the national party who wanted to win a Senate seat, was responsible for Salazar’s photo-finish 73-27 win over Miles in the primary.

I don’t live in Colorado, and thus don’t know if something else is going on, but it sure as hell looks like suicidal cannibalism of the highest order. And it poses a real challenge to those outside Colorado who keep insisting that the post-election activist insurgency in Democratic circles is “not about ideology, but about Democrats winning.”

There are competing explanations for Gates’ fall, but if it happened in large part because of his early support for Salazar in last year’s Senate race, it seems the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Sure, the party should, as a rule, hesitate before officially taking sides in a primary fight, even when one candidate is the obvious front-runner, but a successful state chair shouldn’t be replaced on this alone.

If Colorado Dems are unprepared for next year’s statewide races because the state party replaced their successful chair with a less-experienced leader, the switch could be more than just embarrassing.