The Mayor’s Ball Friday night offered up another chapter in the continuing saga of what can only be described as the night of the long knitting needles. The long and short of it? Tricoteuse Madame “Galen Wells” Defarge was busy scanning the 1000 plus crowd for the next name on her list. Her target, Councilman Mike Geake, who had to endure various attempts of exorcism by the embattled reign of terror making Wells.
Geake was having none of it. Raised voices, and a potential fistfight loomed at the otherwise staid event, despite the best attempts of others seated at the table to steer the one woman train wreck from completing her mission. The gist of their argument centers on the usual loyalty oath that Wells seems hell bent on extracting, like a pound of flesh, from local Dems. Wells apparently accused Geake of misguided actions, strangely devoid of detail and substance. In Defarge like fashion, she threated that Geake’s political career would be broken into pieces, presumably by her, should he not start taking her direction and orders. She even suggested that Geake should rejoin the Democratic party. The lifelong Democrat Geake, naturally took affront that Wells would imperiously decree who is a Democrat and has no plans to follow her edicts.
With no guillotine handy, Wells has certainly been busy stabbing knitting needles into the hides of Dems who apparently don’t subscribe to her ring kissing demands. But not without consequence. The Democratic caucus to elect party committee members was conducted with the usual Wells attention to (lack of) detail, resulting in an official challenge filed by Mike Coffey. The substance of the challenge centers around, surprise, the failure of Wells to actually notice all Democrats of the internal party elections, as required by the local party rules. If this scenario has a certain sense of deja vu about it, it’s because these same characters were at war over a similar issue in the 2006 state rep race that pitted Bruce Morris and Carvin Hilliard over who filed notices properly. Then, Wells lost her case and was admonished for not being a terribly good Democratic leader by a panel of her peers. The likelihood of a similar fate on this issue is looking pretty good. I don’t think there’s much future for a political career built on vengeance and losing, but time will tell this tale to its conclusion. As for Dickens, he rendered the fate of Madame Defarge poetically, “Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.”
