A while back, we noted that the redoubtable Jane Fleming Kleeb, the grassroots tyro who got the people of Nebraska together to help stop the Keystone XL pipeline, the continent-spanning death funnel and current conservative fetish object, was making a try to become an official of the Nebraska state Democratic chairman out there on the vast prairie. At the time, she seemed content to be running for vice-chairman, but things changed at the state convention, and Kleeb is now the state Democratic chairperson. Via theOmaha World-Herald:

Jane Kleeb, a leader in the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline, was elected chairwoman of the state Democratic Party on Saturday with the help of Bernie Sanders supporters. Kleeb, 43, vowed to work with both the Sanders and the Hillary Clinton wings of the party to put more Democrats into office in Nebraska… "For too long the people of Nebraska have been subject to the leadership of a party that is all too content to sacrifice the progress of the people for the comfort of the elite," said Kleeb, who will replace outgoing Chairman Vince Powers in December.

This is a little election with big lessons to teach. First, if the Bernie people want to affect the political revolution they love to talk about so much, this is the level where it starts to get done. Elect your people to party office, and then to the state legislature–hoorah for the ol' unicameral!–through which you can develop a farm team to supply you with congresscritters for the next few decades. You don't think the Republicans built Steve King in a lab, do you? Don't answer that.

Second, this is a textbook example of how movements outside the formal political process can energize the institutions within the formal political process. Kleeb made her bones organizing a bipartisan bunch of farmers and ranchers who were sick of being bullied and lied to by the Canadian corporation that wanted to run the pipeline through their land. And they beat it. She since has moved on to help local grassroots organizations that are fighting pipelines in other states. And now she also is the chairman of a state Democratic party.

And, finally, look closely at what she said. The Bernie people helped her get elected, but one of her first moves was to reconcile with the Nebraska Democrats who supported Hillary Rodham Clinton, for whom, I predict, Kleeb will turn out to be a formidable surrogate. This is the way movements are supposed to work.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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