Roosevelt Reception

Good Evening Fellow Democrats,

Welcome to your MCDP’s Spring Event, The “Roosevelt Reception!” We used to have the JJ, now we have the RR! This is our first spring event in over two years – but we are BACK!

My name is David G. Henry, and I appear before you tonight, for the first time, as your party chair. Would you believe it has only been 10 weeks ago since we got going together?

If you are a candidate tonight, please raise your hand – everyone should know you by now. Get to work for them, punch above the belt, and let’s turn up the volume in this primary to let them know we are back in Bloomington!

If you met 8 of them and got your card punched, drop it in the basket—there is still time to compete for door prize!

First, I want to recognize our event sponsors, John Hamilton for Mayor, Erika Oliphant for Prosecutor, And Ed and Claire Robertson, And all the others listed on the program and on the dais here tonight.

I’d like to also take this moment to introduce you to your party officers and new deputies Allyson McBride, Cory Ray, Ashley Pirani, Sam Ujdak, And Shruti Rana.

Tonight I also announce two new folks joining the team who are not here tonight: Susan Hingle, as Deputy for Special Projects and Jerrett Alexander, who will be our field organizer for our own coordinated campaigns in the General Election.

The Roosevelts have a unique relationship to our community. For their Uncle Teddy, a progressive Republican (what an anachronism), spoke at IU’s commencement in 1918.

In the audience that day was a young professor at the School of Law, Paul McNutt, who would go on to be our Governor.

McNutt, and his old IU roommate Wendell Willkie, would both go on to be defeated by FDR in their bids for president, as Democrat and Republican respectively in 1940.

So you’d think right there, Bloomington would want little to do with our 32nd president.

And yet, FDR kept IU’s President Herman Wells on the speed dial when it came to matters of education, so much so that ole Herman could be considered a Secretary of Education in all but name.

It was that relationship in part, that led to so much of IU’s campus being built with Works Progress Administration projects. And that relationship that later led Eleanor Roosevelt to Bloomington in 1950, in her role as chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, to speak to students and community here on the emergent Soviet threat.

So it seems fitting to expand the aperture of our Spring celebration to include Eleanor, with our inaugural Eleanor Roosevelt Keynote delivered on foreign policy and a citizen’s role in it, with our next Indiana Secretary of State Destiny Wells.

However, if that all sounds too much like the Ivory tower between the town and gown, consider this:

When a Bloomingtonian goes to Congress, they take with them our community’s voice into the world.

Lee Hamilton’s accomplishments in foreign policy and national security are well known, with a school that now bears his name.

But our late mayor, Frank McCloskey, took on a keen interest in the Balkans when elected to Congress, including the defense of Croatia from genocide and ethnic cleansing by Serbia in the 1990s.

Would you believe that there is a bridge in Croatia, named for Frank from Indiana? I know many of you knew that already. But now you all do.

Here is what I know for sure. As Isak and Liam and Matt duke it out to win our nomination for the 9th, our next Representative to Congress from these parts is gonna be a Bloomingtonian!

So tonight, we take a different approach, exploring Bloomington and Indiana’s voice in the global public square.

To help us explore the consequences of being a Hoosier in the World, we turn to our Next Senator from Indiana, a Navy Veteran and mayor of Hammond, Tom McDermott, and Next Sec of State , a Lt. Colonel in the Army reserve, attorney and Truman National Security scholar alumna Destiny Wells.

Yes, you may note I gave their rank and service. And while our current Senator may be a Marine, his peacetime service was spent collecting college degrees in Chicago and London.

But, this generation of Democrats are coming into their own in our state have seen the maw of war, and prove that indeed there are Democrats in Foxholes. We welcome them tonight.

When we came up with this idea in February, we didn’t know at the time that the war drums would sound in Ukraine.

Bloomington is an international community. We will hear shortly from one of ours, Nick Belyayev, a First Generation Ukrainian American, a public school teacher and Democratic leader who cut his teeth in our local politics, shares with us his family’s harrowing story, in real time.

We then hear from our guests Dr. Elizabeth Dunn and Sam Waterman, who, when our state under Pence and Republicans sought to slam the door on refugees, it was Bloomington, that has embraced those seeking a better and safer live here with open arms.

Now, some folks have asked as a local party chair why we are talking foreign policy in the waning moments of a primary. And I’ll tell you. Because the world affects us in the Hoosier Homeland: At the gas pump When our neighbors in uniform may be called to war When our opposition looks upon the misogyny and racism and white supremacy they have unleashed with complete indifference When the Party of Reagan has become the Party of Putin.

I am often told that our politics here in Bloomington just won’t work in the rest of Indiana and I must respectfully disagree.

For Bloomington and Monroe County stop being Bloomington and Monroe County if we do not, each day, push hard for progress in our time. And look where that pushing has led: We are now a state party that supports opening the decrim and legalization of cannabis We are now a party that protects the dignity of labor and the demand for a living wage for all working people, at least $15 an hour. We are now a state party that says from North Vernon to South Bend that Trans rights are human rights That BLACK LIVES MATTER We are the only governing partner we have that demands A free, universal public education Free of Republican noodling and micromanagement And unafraid to teach our children about the world as it is, instead of the 1950’s dystopia the Right wants it to be.

We are the only party that has created jobs, resurrected the economy in the aftermath of pandemic, and continues to strive for healthcare for all.

IN short, while they Destroy, DEMOCRATS DELIVER.

Now, that rhetoric may seem too much for Midwestern sensibilities. But when our opposition continues to hock MAGA hats at the Monroe County Fair, When they collude with dark money to bring Ann Coulter to spew venom at IU, When their chair, as campaign manager to a statewide candidate, bates our public with bigotry against trans teens.

I say, as FDR taught us years ago about the oligarchs and monopolists, that if our opposition is unanimous in their hatred of our defense of reproductive rights of women, of our demand for equality for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+, and for protecting our public schools and families and working people, then, I welcome their hatred.

But let us not hate, let’s get to work.