The Ghost Chairman of the Democratic Party
Washington State Democrats wonder if their leader is actually living in Utah or just avoiding the job.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Politicians cannot satisfy themselves whether Chairman C.G. Heifner of the Democratic State Committee takes his residence with him when he spends his days in Salt Lake City, or that the Bourbon leader is merely hibernating in the Mormon metropolis and really belongs to Seattle. Mr. Heifner has made only one trip to Seattle in five or six months. He was not in the city long enough then to renew acquaintance with the outlying districts, but he stayed sufficient time to announce that he would return again to straighten out any tangles that might arise. Mr. Heifner is an attorney whose specialty is insurance business, which has taken him to Utah. He has proclaimed his intention ultimately to reside in Seattle, but neither his friends nor his political acquaintances have any intimation whether his next visit will bring him back for the year of campaigning, or whether he will remain beyond the year. At his last visit, he gave out a long statement of what the Democrats would do, telling warriors to be up and doing, and claiming that Republican rule was responsible for most of the troubles in the state. 'Turn the rascals out' was the slogan he sounded, and having sounded it, Mr. Heifner beat everybody in a race to the exit. He left for Utah the next day.
“Turn the rascals out was the slogan he sounded, and having sounded it, Mr. Heifner beat everybody in a race to the exit.”
The frustration of absentee leadership is a timeless political trope; just as 1904 Democrats questioned whether their chairman was actually in Washington to lead them, modern voters frequently grapple with the question of whether their representatives are tethered to the reality of the districts they serve or operating from the periphery.
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