OK, this needs a little background: it recently came out that Indiana Democrats had forged multiple signatures on the 2008 primary nominating petitions for both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The situation was sufficiently bad that former Democratic governor (and Clinton supporter) Joe Kernan had to come out and announce that no, that wasn’t his signature on the Obama petition; in other words, it’s bad enough that the Democrats are having to do damage control right now. The designated fall guy is apparently going to be St. Joseph County Democratic Chair Butch Morgan; he resigned last night. Morgan is claiming that he did nothing wrong, but he’s resigning anyway.
Now, why this is kind of interesting is because Morgan was also the Democratic chair for Indiana’s second Congressional district. Which is – oddly enough! – a Red district with a Blue Congressman. One who is running for Congress.
IN-02 is currently held by Joe Donnelly, who defeated (current Club For Growth President) Chris Chocola in 2006, apparently mostly from elevated Democratic turnout from… St. Joseph County (Butch Morgan had both positions for quite some time). In 2010 Donnelly came extremely close to losing his seat to Jackie Walorski; sufficiently close, in fact, that the final results were well within the 1% or so that I would personally call the true “margin of fraud*.” Given Morgan’s resignation, perhaps this election should be re-examined?
Anyway: Donnelly is now running for Senate, most likely because recent redistricting has made the seat somewhat untenable; admittedly, it’s not much more viable for a Democrat to be running for a Senate seat in 2012, but you play the cards that you’ve drawn. Since Donnelly and Morgan are long-time political allies, it’s no surprise that Morgan had been an early supporter of Donnelly’s Senate run; which makes Joe Donnelly’s silence on this matter somewhat… suspect. After all, Butch Morgan absolutely insists that he did nothing wrong: does Representative Donnelly not believe his old friend and reliable ally?
And if Donnelly doesn’t believe Morgan, doesn’t he have an obligation to say so? What’s more important to Joe: Indiana, or the Democratic party of Indiana?
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Most people say five percent; personally, I’d move the decimal point one to the left.
Good job Moe, this story has LEGS and will help to turn IN even further red!