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More News Columnists
- Bill Slakey: As Trib closes, many questions remain unasked
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- Ty Murray Invitational thrills fans in Albuquerque
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*Note: The Tribune does not create and is not responsible for the blogosphere's headlines and stories. These links to blogs talking about ABQTrib.com are automatically generated. Use them at your own risk.
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I give Brian Colón credit for one thing. And maybe it's the biggest thing.
When people were screaming for someone's head after Tuesday's disastrous Democratic Party presidential caucus, Colón willingly placed his neck in the public guillotine.
Blame me, he said.
My fault.
My mistake.
Maybe Colón 's title - state Democratic Party chairman - automatically elects him as the guy most likely to wear the scapegoat's horns for this mess. But look at it this way: When things go wrong, how often does the person in charge really become the fall guy? Especially when the falling is done in public?
Nah, it's always somebody else's problem. Such situations, particularly in politics, generally come under the heading of "technical difficulties," or "bad intelligence" or "that's a personnel matter." In the Democrats' case, they usually blame George W. Bush, but that one was off the table this time.
Bottom line: People make such an art out of deflecting blame that someone accepting it seems rather odd.
And so it's been this week, almost from the moment people started gutting out three-hour lines to vote in Rio Rancho, or waiting for Kinko's (the official copier of the New Mexico Democratic Party?) to finish banging out replacement ballots.
Look, it was a disaster - the latest in a long line of New Mexico bonehead vote-night stories. And there's no defending, say, the decision to put just one polling site in Rio Rancho, a small, sleepy burg of 75,000 people.
Still, it should be noted that there don't appear to be lost ballots in this caucus, as there were in 2000, the mess of all election messes.
And that one was run by so-called elections pros.
What killed Colón and the Democrats was a perfect storm: an inadequate number of polling sites in a year when an exciting, evenly matched pair of candidates were battling it out for their party's nomination.
I'm not sure anyone really understood how big this was going to get until last week, when Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and President Clinton, followed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, rolled into New Mexico and drew astounding crowds that made the fire marshal earn his paycheck.
Until, say, last Saturday, would anyone really have figured a 50 percent rise in turnout from the 2004 caucus? C'mon. No way.
Maybe Colón and the Democrats should have changed their poll-site plan when they saw those crowds, but to do so at that late date probably would've created its own storm of confusion and controversy.
For his part, Colón , a lawyer, has not retreated - not even as the unfinished count took longer and would-be supporters walked away.
Gov. Bill Richardson, who on Tuesday night defended the process to KRQE News 13, abandoned Colón in a statement Wednesday - after the screaming got particularly loud and the governor apparently began noticing that some of the muck might get on him.
Colón took the guv's whuppin' and didn't blink.
"I can assure you," Colón told reporters Thursday morning, "that I'm even more disappointed than the governor."
Later, he added:
"You know it's an honor to represent the party. It's disappointing that I wasn't able to execute on this caucus as well as I would have liked to."
I don't know Brian Colón a lick. I know the mistakes he made inconvenienced a lot of people, and got him in trouble with the public and probably his own party.
But I also know he could have ducked behind a spokesman or three, blamed someone other than himself, or simply turned off his cell phone. He did not do those things.
Instead, he chose the guillotine.
For that, if nothing else, his neck deserves to be spared.
