New Albany’s public housing residents are among the city most vulnerable. To borrow candidate Canon’s words, they’re getting screwed by a government that doesn’t listen, and they need someone to fight for them.
This poses a vexing problem for local Democrats, seeing as the perpetrator of this outrage isn’t a Republican.
Jeff Gahan is a Democrat, or at least he plays one at ribbon cuttings, and not only is Gahan’s attitude toward these folks just as callous, unresponsive and condescending as any stereotypical and villainous Republican’s might be, because in addition, Gahan is the apple of the local party’s eye, a gleaming fertilizer of patronage in human form.
If the term “great white hope” didn’t already exist, we’d need to invent it to describe the emerging cult of personality of Gahanism. No one has swallowed more of the abundant Kool-Aid than party chairman Adam Dickey, and whichever of the mayor’s family members currently occupy positions of party authority.
As progressive Democrats nationwide follow candidate Canon’s lead and follow the money, Gahan has only one default setting for pretend-governance: “Show me even more money.”
Candidate Canon’s video is stirring. It pushes all the right buttons. Unfortunately for local Democrats, the cognitive dissonance can only worsen, because these criticisms comprise an index finger pointing right at Gahan.
Or maybe it’s a middle finger. Sometimes I can’t tell them apart.
We’re fast approaching a year since Gahan’s public housing putsch was launched. In all this time, not a single local Democratic elected official apart from the mayor himself has bothered to comment for attribution on this situation.
As for the local Democratic candidates contesting state elections in 2018, only Anna Murray has responded with hopes for a good outcome, but little in the way of specifics.
Let’s hope the Democratic silence dissipates. As it stands, the hypocrisy is a tad constricting, even by Dickey’s world-class standards — and I’d dearly love to have someone to vote for next year.
