Local Democrats in the Sixth District have met the enemy: And it is us

Local Democrats are bound and determined to f—k up the 2026 midterms, to a point where I’m wondering if it will do us any good to pass the redistricting referendum, and still lose to the feckless Ben Cline.

I ask this after another Beth Macy listening tour event in my backyard found itself hijacked by the living, breathing definition of perfect being the enemy of the good, and I’m simply at a loss.

Macy and Tom Perriello are duking it out for the Sixth District Democratic Party nomination; neither, unfortunately for them, is a deity walking among us.

I say we’re good with either as our nominee – Macy because she’s spent her adult life as a journalist learning about, then telling us about, the ravages of globalism, opioid addiction and MAGA politics on Appalachia; Perriello because he’s done this before, as a thirtysomething one-term congressman from rural Virginia, who has built up a considerable political skillset since his time in Congress.

In an ideal world, we have both; but our world being far from ideal, we’re on track to have neither.

Macy is the one of the two who does the listening tour thing – that was the gimmick to her most recent book, Paper Girl, which had her traveling back and forth to her rural Ohio hometown to try to figure out why it had fallen so hard under the spell of MAGA since her days there.

Apparently, the activists among us haven’t figured out yet that a listening tour means, the person holding the event wants to hear what’s on your mind, what you think needs attention.

For the second time, our local activists want to hear that Macy has all the answers – as if that’s how politics has ever worked.

I mean, if you’re Donald Trump, and you have a compliant Congress and Supreme Court, and a press that doesn’t speak truth to power, you can threaten to withhold billions in education funding from colleges and universities that have DEI programs, close down hospitals that offer gender-affirming care, and just for fun, tariff our NATO allies one day, then berate them for not backing us in Iran the next.

Because Ben Cline isn’t going to step up to stop him, John Roberts isn’t going to stop him, Gannett Inc., the corporate parent of The News Leader, which is fanning the flames among our local activist base, isn’t going to stop him.

The perfect is the enemy of the good types are why we have a Donald Trump in the first place; first time through, they were butthurt over Bernie Sanders, and partnered with Putin puppet Jill Stein to punish Hillary Clinton, and the rest of us; in 2024, well, by golly, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris weren’t 1,000 percent perfect from their perspective on Gaza, and now we find ourselves in another war in the Middle East, and Trump wants to turn Gaza into a resort for the gilded.

It’s not lost on me that it’s the dying local newspaper owned by a billion-dollar company that bent the knee to Trump last spring when it agreed to no longer publish diversity data about its workforce that’s stirring this sh-t up.

Actually, just checked the market cap of Gannett – it’s no longer a billion-dollar company.

A lot of good bending the knee to the MAGA overlords is doing for them.

The sooner Gannett and the Leader hit the dustbin of history, the better.

Reality check for the self-appointed local Dem gatekeepers – if we can manage to get out of our own way enough to win in November, the next two years aren’t going to be about knocking items off the wish list.

Donald Trump is still president; the Supreme Court is still 6-3 Trump.

We’re going to need somebody – and both Beth Macy and Tom Perriello fit the bill here – who can stand for what we need them to stand for, but at the same time, get things done against a backdrop where two of the three branches of our government are controlled by people who do not have our best interests in mind.

If we don’t win control of Congress back in November, we might be winding down this democratic republican experiment that a group of slaveholder White guys got going in the 18th century, and we slowly started perfecting, before we helped the slaveholder White guy class claw it back from us.

It’s time that we decide, real f—kin soon, what we want the future to be.