Wrapped in white sheets to memorialize the uninsured dead, a crowd of 150 gathered to wave protest signs demanding universal health care. Their “die-in,” staged in August 2009, attracted considerable media attention.

The protesters waited at the entrance of Millcreek Canyon hoping to seize a moment of time from their elusive 2nd District congressman, Rep. Jim Matheson, a Blue Dog Democrat who voted against health-care reform in committee and would also vote against it in the U.S. House of Representatives. The protesters had heard the congressman was on his way to Log Haven Restaurant for a fundraiser, and they thought they had a choke point. “We thought there was only one way in there,” activist Richard Lafon says.

But somehow Matheson slipped past them. “I don’t know if he ducked down in his seat,” Lafon says, “but he certainly didn’t engage us.”

While he has challengers to the political left and right in his 2010 race for reelection, Matheson is favored to win, perhaps proving that he can slip by progressives in the political sphere as easily as he did protesters in Millcreek Canyon.

After all, his approval ratings are as high as ever, and each time he’s reelected, it’s by a wider margin. Matheson supporters argue that that proves he’s doing his job: Utah’s 2nd District is conservative, and therefore Matheson needs be moderate, both to win re-election and represent his constituents. His moderate politics have turned Republican-leaning independents into Democrat-leaning independents and widened the Democratic Party’s appeal in Utah.

Despite frustration among progressives, many argue it’s bad strategy to purify the Democratic Party of moderates like Matheson. In Congress, shrinking or eliminating the party’s majority would hamper or end its ability to direct the agenda.

And on the local and state level, supporters credit his moderation with boosting the party’s victory tally.

Despite all that, an “anyone but Matheson” sentiment is brewing. Some progressives argue that if their chosen candidate can’t win the seat, perhaps even a Republican would be better.

Progressive Purgatory
It started in 2000. That year, Matheson—the son of the late and well-liked Democratic Gov. Scott M. Matheson—won the seat that had been held by Republican Merrill Cook. A divisive politician among Republicans, Cook had been trailing in the polls during the year leading up the election and was defeated in the Republican primary.

Salt Lake County progressives really met their fate the next year, however, when the Republican-dominated Legislature tried to solve the irksome 15 percent Matheson victory by changing the boundaries of the 2nd District. What had been a Salt Lake County-only district was changed to include many rural, conservative counties on the eastern side of the state. The district now stretches from the Avenues of Salt Lake City to San Juan County. Even the conservative editorial board at The Wall Street Journal called it gerrymandering.

According to Cook, who toyed with the idea of again seeking the congressional seat he once held but instead is running for the U.S. Senate, Salt Lake County remains “the heart” of the 2nd District. The redistricting, however, lessened the importance of urban voters, where Utah progressives are concentrated.

Zoom forward to 2006, after Matheson had barely won re-election both times in the new district. That year, some progressives, on the advice of then-Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, vowed to vote for a Green Party candidate to send a message to Matheson that it was time to move left. It was reported in Congressional Quarterly that year that Matheson had voted in favor of President Bush’s agenda 63 percent of the time, including a vote in favor of invading Iraq.

Next, zoom forward to 2009, when Democrats controlled Congress and the presidency. His same-old critics were further frustrated, but a whole new crop of Democrats started to get angry, too.

Local activists organized a phone tree in May to challenge Matheson when he strayed from progressive ideals on the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade climate-change bill.

So you want to be a delegate? There are ample reasons for wanting to be a party delegate: you get outsized influence in choosing candidates for public office, candidates finally seek your attention rather than you having to gain theirs and you get to know your neighbors—so long as they are members of your party. “The precinct is the very bottom, grass-roots starting point for all politics,” says State Democratic Party Stonewall Caucus chair Nikki Boyer. City Weekly asked Boyer for some tips on how to become a delegate for either the Democratic or Republican parties, and what to do if you are elected. Step 1: Call your county clerk for the location of your March 23 mass meeting. Step 2: Recruit a few—or several—close neighbors to come with you and, ideally, vote for you. Step 3: Go to your neighborhood mass meeting. Bring identification that proves you live in the neighborhood. Step 4: Go to convention in early summer, let the candidates address you, and then vote in all of the races for your district. Step 5: If there are more than two candidates in any race, and no candidate in the first round gets 60 percent of the vote, delegates vote again for either of the top two candidates. That’s it. The winner gets his or her name on the ballot as the official candidate from the party. “Your time commitment as a delegate is minimal,” Boyer says. “It’s just one day per year [for convention].” For more information about the caucus meetings, contact your county clerk or go to UTDemocrats.org or UTGOP.org.

The phone tree was activated just once, but his office received 400 calls that demanded a change in his position.

“In response to that, [Matheson] went underground. He didn’t show up to the rest of the hearings, he skipped committee markup and never showed up during the floor debate,” says activist Tim DeChristopher, the so-called Bidder 70, so nicknamed for his role in fouling up a public lands mineral-lease auction in the waning days of the George W. Bush presidency.

“It was a difficult issue and [Matheson] was scared. That’s really what his M.O. is. He wants to hide.”

That was in May. The “no-show” Millcreek Canyon showdown happened in August, when some activists were already talking about recruiting a candidate to oppose Matheson, says “die-in” organizer Stephanie Bailey- Hatfield.

It happened again later in the year. In November, Lafon, a regional coordinator for MoveOn.org, organized a meeting at Matheson’s South Salt Lake office to discuss Matheson’s “no” vote on health-care reform. “They knew we were coming,” Lafon says. "It was 4:30 in the afternoon and what [Matheson’s staff] decided to do was back out the back door, turn out the lights and lock the door.”

People Power
The next day, DeChristopher anonymously posted a want ad on Craigslist seeking a progressive candidate with “a strong commitment to defending fundamental human rights over corporate profits.” The ad listed qualifications for Congress and the annual wage of $174,000. Links to the ad floated around Facebook and Twitter, although most interpreted it as a joke. “[The ad] was put up there partly out of frustration,” DeChristopher says. Lafon adds, “This was after we tried to get as many people as we could to run against Rep. Matheson.”

Not everyone thought it was a joke. Potentially viable candidates responded to the ad, including two University of Utah professors. About that time, a loose collection of about 10 progressive activists began organizing what would become the Citizens’ Candidate organization.

DeChristopher hit the phones, rounding up longtime progressive activists to help in choosing a candidate. It wasn’t hard to recruit them. “I don’t think I ever finished the pitch for anyone. Pretty much I would be midway through my first sentence, and people would say, ‘Yes, whatever it is, if it’s an effort to take out Jim Matheson, I’m in.’ ” The panelists included Brian Moench, a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists and founder of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment; Utah Coalition of La Raza president Archie Archuleta; and others. Equality Utah´s executive director Brandie Balken also participated but not as a representative of her organization, which doesn’t work on federal races.

On Jan. 30, the panelists and members of the public interviewed the finalists at the Salt Lake City Main Library. Around 100 people attended. Each resident of the 2nd District was allowed to vote in an instant-runoff election. The voters chose University of Utah professor of pathology John Weis, who argued Congress needs more scientists and engineers. Weis dropped out days later, stating he hadn’t expected to win and hadn’t adequately anticipated the time commitments.

No re-vote was necessary, however, because instantrunoff elections gauge the electorate’s preferences for each candidate. With Weis out of the running, the winner became University of Utah gender-studies professor Claudia Wright (left). Salt Lake City-born Wright taught at Cottonwood High School for 31 years and now teaches in the humanities and education departments of the University of Phoenix in addition to the University of Utah. She’s a lifelong Democrat and a lesbian who is serious about winning.

“If you want a citizen-based government and democracy, this is how you do it,” Wright says of the Citizens’ Candidate model. “If you want a plutocracy that is run by corporate interests, [contemporary party politics] is how you do it. Choose. Because that’s really what it’s going to come down to. … I think we are dominated by special interests and lobbyists, and that’s exactly what I’m calling Matheson out on.”

Wright is a strong supporter of single-payer universal health care, marriage equality for same-sex couples, a carbon tax and public financing of all elections. She says Matheson is a servant to his corporate donors who cares too much about being re-elected and not enough about progressive policies.

The Citizens’ Candidate activists serve as Wright’s energetic and unpaid campaign staff, now numbering almost 20 committed people. Ashley Anderson says, “We have more people offering to help than we know what to tell them to do.” There is plenty to do, however, and most of the Citizens’ Candidate activists are new to party politics, precincts, conventions and the like. “A lot of us don’t know what we’re doing,” Ashley Anderson says. “We’ve been seeking advice from a lot of people.”

The effort may be gaining momentum in political circles. Lafon says progressive heavyweight MoveOn. org—which Lafon says counts 23,000 members in Utah, including 14,000 in the 2nd District—have not officially endorsed or funded Citizens’ Candidate, but he’s hoping they will sign on. MoveOn has criticized Matheson in the past, running a radio-ad campaign during 2009 urging residents to call Matheson and ask him to change his stance on health-care reform.

Party Planning
Wright has the tactical instincts necessary to make Matheson anxious at convention—if anyone can. She heard from party insiders, for example, that San Juan County has never organized a mass meeting to elect delegates to the Democratic Party Convention. If she can round up just a handful of supporters in the county to host such a meeting, those votes could be a gimme. She knows it’s an uphill battle, though, and talks about matching tough strategy with passion.

What Wright doesn’t have, however, is much time, and it’ll take her roughly six hours by car just to cross into San Juan County lines from her home in Salt Lake City. Some political watchers say there just isn’t enough time left before the March caucus meetings to get anything out of the May Democratic Convention besides a speech, the party equivalent of a green participation ribbon.

Rocky Anderson, Matheson’s most prominent critic, supports the Citizens’ Candidate initiative “as a nice way to bring attention” to Matheson’s shortcomings but believes Wright should be running as an independent or a third-party candidate. His goal is to remove Matheson, whatever it takes. He thinks Wright and her inexperienced campaign volunteers have no chance of surviving the convention. The Citizens’ Candidate movement could have more impact, he says, by creating a spoiler effect that might force Matheson to move left to ensure he doesn’t lose too many progressive votes.

There are currently two declared Republican candidates for the party’s nomination to challenge Matheson: American Fork resident Morgan Philpot (left) and Neil Walter of St. George. Philpot, the former state party vice chair who served in the Legislature between 2000 and 2004, was skeptical that he’d correctly heard that the Citizens’ Candidate group was working inside the Democratic Party. “Is it true they’re running at the Democratic Convention?” asked the small-government, low-taxes, states-rights Republican. “Who talked them into that? They’re going to be led surely and quietly to their grave in this election by doing that. It doesn’t really help me because I know exactly where they’re going to be taken in the Democratic Party Convention: They’re going to be shown the door.”

Former Congressman Cook agrees that Utah Democrats might prefer Wright, but he says pragmatism will take over at convention. “The heart of the Democratic Party will probably be where [Wright] is, and yet the leadership and unions and people that provide the money and the establishment part of the Democratic Party will be holding tight to Matheson, I can assure you of that.”

Wright bristles at suggestions that her campaign will be squashed six months before the general election vote, or that an independent candidacy may be more effective. “I’m not going to run a write-in campaign; I’m not going to be an independent. … Democrats are a rare breed enough in this state. We do not need to kill off each other.”

She argues that the best way to neutralize Matheson’s corporate sponsors and strengthen the Democratic Party is to work precinct-by-precinct to grab delegates. “[The Citizens’ Candidate campaign] is only unrealistic to the political pundit who’s only done it one way. ... In my voting district, usually when I go to the mass meeting there are seven to nine [party members], which makes five the majority. It only takes five of you to make a delegate in a lot of places in this city.”

Polished Pig
It’s not just Matheson’s 2009 votes on the Waxman- Markey climate-change bill and health-care reform that irk progressives. “Over the years, I keep saying, ‘This is the worst I’ve seen from him,’ and then it doesn’t take long before something else equally bad, if not worse, comes out of Jim Matheson,” says Rocky Anderson. The founder of High Road for Human Rights—who says he hopes to never run for Congress again—has a long list of Matheson votes and positions he finds deplorable.

Matheson voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. He voted in favor of the Military Commissions Act, a law the denied the right of habeas corpus to U.S. detainees. He voted in favor of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which union activists complain sends American jobs to countries where workers are more easily exploited.

Matheson broke with his party and voted in favor of a $1.3 trillion Bush tax cut in 2001. Those tax cuts cost $400 billion more than the House health-care reform bill that Matheson voted against, citing a lack of reform measures that would curb costs. “I think putting 30 million additional people into a program that’s going to crash off a financial cliff is not responsible legislating,” Matheson said Feb. 12 on KCPW’s Politics Up Close. Matheson’s staff declined multiple requests from City Weekly to make him available for an interview.

Matheson has also had to dodge complaints since entering Congress that he won’t co-sponsor America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act, which would provide wilderness designation to 9.4 million acres of public lands. The bill has 22 co-sponsors in the Senate and 157 in the House, but Matheson isn’t one of them. At an Oct. 1 subcommittee hearing on the bill, he complained that the 20-year-old proposal has not been collaborative enough or inclusive of all stakeholders.

And that’s just his voting record. During summer 2009’s contentious health-care debates, he held no town hall meetings where constituents could face him.

“Matheson won’t even hold public meetings with his constituents. It’s all done in conference call where they can simply, you know, go through and delete the people they don’t want to talk to. I’m not interested in that,” Wright says. “He knows he’s really ticked off his constituency. He knows people are really upset over this health-care thing, and he doesn’t want to deal with them in person.”

Philpot, who also ran for the seat in 2000 but lost in convention, was at a loss to list any policy positions of his that might appeal to Matheson’s Democratic detractors, but he promised to hold public meetings and to be accessible to all. “Here’s the difference. I won’t use them. They’re being used. They’re being asked to step up to the plate and vote for somebody they don’t like simply because they’re being told that if they don’t, they’re going to get something worse. That’s B.S.,” Philpot says. “They need to know that their representative, even if he’s not going to agree with them, is going to listen to them and be honest with them, and they don’t have that right now. They have somebody who’s playing them for the fool. That’s not fair.”

Democrats outside Salt Lake County, such as Carbon County Democratic Party Chair Ed Chavez, aren’t relegated to conference-call-only access. “Every time he comes to Carbon County, I’m able to meet face-to-face with him,” Chavez says. Matheson’s vote on health care was controversial in Chavez’s part of the state, he says, but the climate-change bill in coal-mining Carbon County? “Nobody’s talking about that down here.”

While Matheson remains popular with rural Democrats like Chavez—a January 2009 poll showed an astounding approval rating of 87 percent—those who oppose him do so with zeal.

“He’s worse than a Republican,” DeChristopher says. “The only thing worse than a wolf is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

Some complain Matheson has a neutering effect on the state Democratic Party, which itself is often criticized by progressives for acquiescing to the Republican legislative agenda without adequate blood spilled or tears shed in fighting it.

Former state Democratic Party communications director Jeff Bell, now the host of Left of the Dial on KSL Radio and blogger on JMBell.org, says Matheson does have a moderating—and self-censoring—effect on state Democrats. “With Matheson being the highest-on-the-ticket elected Democrat in the state, he has a lot more influence when he or his people talk to the state party and say, ‘We want you to say this, do this, behave this way.’ … The reason is very simple. Jim can, especially when you look at his poll ratings and ever-increasing margins of victory, do a lot of good endorsing down-ticket candidates.”

Practically Perfect

For all the acrimony, many remain perfectly satisfied with Matheson, a Democrat in Utah who in recent years has been ranked more popular than anyone besides former Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. And while some complain that Matheson has defanged Democratic legislators who benefit from his continued success, others credit him with making the party more successful.

“We’re having more success in areas where Jim is above those candidates on the ballot. There’s no doubt about it that he has an effect,” Utah Democratic Party Chair Wayne Holland says. “Four [state Legislature] seats we took from Republicans [were] all in the 2nd District [since Matheson took office], and in one we held with a freshman against a viable Republican.”

Holland is a pragmatist. He self-identifies as a progressive, says he was in favor of health-care reform, but trusts Matheson’s judgment. While some complain that Matheson is a poll-watching politician without principles, Holland credits him for representing the will of his constituents. “The House of Representatives was designed to be close to the people,” he says.

Matheson’s opponents aren’t fairly assessing his voting record, Holland says. The party chair points to numerous legislative vote scorecards that distinguish Matheson as decidedly more liberal than his Republican counterparts, Reps. Rob Bishop and Jason Chaffetz, who represent the 1st and 3rd Congressional districts in Utah, respectively.

That’s true. Scorecards from the American Civil Liberties Union; League of Conservation Voters; American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (pdf); Christian Coalition; and Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law all reveal that Matheson is more liberal than Bishop or Chaffetz. Sure, Matheson voted to ban gay marriage in the U.S. Constitution, but he ticked off the Christian Coalition by voting to extend hate-crimes protection to gay and transgender Americans. Can you imagine a Utah Republican doing that?

Holland is also a strategist. He says liberals willing to purge Matheson over his vote on health care and climate change should consider whether those issues would even be debated in Congress if not for moderates like Matheson. “Health care wouldn’t even be an issue. There would be no votes if Democrats weren’t in control of the House and Senate. We have to have those [moderate] members in the caucuses in both houses that can be elected in states that are not like Massachusetts and California.”

He downplays the significance of the Citizens’ Candidate, saying both major parties have internal groups pushing for party purity. He accepts the Citizens’ Candidate group within the Democratic Party with the same warm embrace he gives to Matheson: “The party has to be a broad-based organization that can attract individuals to run as candidates and protect our incumbent.”

And while he would make no prediction about Wright’s chances at the Democratic Party convention, he says, “You don’t see Jim Matheson being challenged by people of stature the way [Utah Sen.] Bob Bennett is and that says to me the majority of our party understands we have to be pragmatic.”