Democrats! Are you going to let John Wiley Price run your party? Really?

Dear Dallas County Democratic Party:

The Democrats finally win Dallas County, and what do they do? Turn it over to John Wiley Price, a closet Republican.

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More About

• John Wiley Price
• Dallas (Texas)
• U.S. Republican Party
• Politics
• Local Politics

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This is a letter from me to you. Don't read it in front of the kids.

You are newly in the majority in Dallas County. While Texas turns more and more Republican, you guys have caught the demographic wave in the other direction. That's so great for you.

So now, newly ensconced as a voting majority on the county commissioners court—the elective board that runs county government—with a plausible shot at dominating city politics as well (more on that in a moment), you have chosen to turn over effective leadership of your party to Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price.

Are you off your meds? Did you suffer a tragic head injury? Are you being commanded by a God-like voice that speaks to you through the air conditioning ducts? Has the guy got a Glock in your back?

Are you really going to take this moment of golden opportunity and hand it off to the man who recently addressed citizens of his county by saying, "You are all white. Go to hell"?

Wait. Stop. Please. Listen to me. This is so important. Just this one thing.

You know he's not a Democrat, right?

You know that. He never has been. Not even a little bit. Oh, I know he wears the jacket. But nobody with any sense has ever believed this man was a Democrat.

In the early years of his career during redistricting after the 1980 census, Price worked with Republicans to try to shaft Martin Frost, a high-tenured Democrat in Congress, working to draw Frost out of his district so the Republicans could carve off half of it in the suburbs and Price could grab the rest. He wanted to go to Washington from Dallas' new minority seat, and he didn't care how.

That's why, when the Democrats drew the final lines, they put lots of middle-class black people in the new Dallas minority district, knowing the black middle class would never vote for Price. Eddie Bernice Johnson got the seat instead, and Frost kept his.

That might even have been OK, if it meant Johnson was all about the bougies, but Price was sort of a Mickey Leland-style Democrat, a supposed champion of the least among us. But c'mon. You know that's a load. Price is a champion of the H. Ross Perot clan.

There's a reason the Perots gave Price's main political operative, Kathy Nealy, her own suite in the American Airlines Center Arena when it was completed in 2001. That was a big wet kiss: Thank you, Commissioner, for helping us defeat all those lefties who wanted the city to spend its money on basic services.

Democrats, I'm talking to you. Does that sound like a Democrat? Are you suffering a lot of confusion lately, like when you leave the house you can't remember how to get back home? Do you honestly believe that John Wiley Price is a champion of working people?

He's never done a thing for working people. In fact he has so perfectly and completely internalized the values of the rich white people for whom he carries water that he actually despises work and the chumps who do it.

Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but I think I need to remind you of the exchanges I had with him two years ago when I was writing about his efforts to stymie development of the Inland Port Project in southern Dallas—a massive high-tech shipping and warehousing development, which, by the way, is still moving toward completion in spite of Price's efforts to hamstring it.

Every inch and every hour the Inland Port Project lost in momentum as the result of Price's actions was money in the bank for the Perots' directly competing Alliance Airport Center in Fort Worth. I don't think that was a coincidence, do you?

In 2008 I asked Price how he could kiss off the promise of 63,000 jobs in southern Dallas, where there never has been a base of industrial jobs, and by never I mean not since the Civil War. He told me that hourly-wage industrial jobs are demeaning and are associated with slavery.

That came up because I came across a letter through an Open Records request in which Price had spoken disdainfully of the promise of jobs in the Inland Project. He said, "During slavery, everybody had a job."

He and I spoke about it twice on the phone, and then he spoke about it again on the radio. In my second conversation with him—I was calling back to give him a chance to reconsider—I said, "During slavery nobody had a job."

He said, "They did have a job. What was it called then?"

"It's called slavery," I said. "They stole their lives."

"Slavery, Jim, that's an institution. And the effort of the institution was working. And working traditionally is a job. I am going to tell you the nickname that most African-Americans have for a job. It's called a slave."

I told him I had worked for five years in the car factories in Detroit when I was young, amid people from everywhere in the world, Ireland, the Middle East, Estonia, the American South, who were lifting up their families by working. They all believed work was honorable, even noble if you don't have any money and you do have mouths to feed.