Cancel the diversity seminar. It turns out that we don't need blacks and women at the table after all. Sympathetic white guys amount to the same thing, according to the head of the Democratic Party in Massachusetts.
It is one thing to ask a white Boston police officer or firefighter to compete for his job with an equally qualified woman or African-American. That might broaden black or female representation within their ranks. It is quite another thing to ask a congressman in the all-white Massachusetts delegation to do the same. That is a ''terrible idea," according to Philip W. Johnston, the party's state chairman. It might even amount to ''racism in blackface," says the Rev. Alex Hurt, a member of the Black Ministerial Alliance in Boston.
Who does Charles R. Stith think he is, suggesting that an accomplished liberal black man might be an attractive alternative to an incumbent liberal white man to voters in the Eighth District? Hasn't Representative Michael E. Capuano earned perfect approval ratings from the NAACP? Does he have to be black, too? Capuano finds that idea so ''disheartening."
Nothing is quite as amusing in politics as watching the self-righteous swallow their rhetoric when it threatens their own comfortable berth. Democrats have been doing it for days. So much for ''inclusion" and ''outreach" and ''diversity." The Democrats not only want to quash any challenge to Capuano from a black independent, they want to lock up Senator John F. Kerry's seat in advance for one of the party's boyos in case the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee makes it to the White House in November.
Why paving the way for Ed Markey (or Marty Meehan or Barney Frank or Steve Lynch) to stroll across the Capitol from a desk in the House to a new desk in the Senate is in the best interests of the people of Massachusetts I do not know.
I do know that if Shannon O'Brien were sitting in the corner office on Beacon Hill a legislative committee would not have met yesterday to consider changing the law to prevent the governor from naming Kerry's successor.
Not that Governor Mitt Romney and the Republicans are immune from cloaking in sanctimony their own political self-interest. Lieutenant Governor Kerry M. Healey was almost believable yesterday when she called on Kerry to resign now from the Senate because his campaign schedule has kept him away from so many important floor votes. It is a valid argument. But, if she had been Governor George W. Bush's lieutenant in Texas in 2000, do we think Healey would have made a case for his resignation?
Similarly, Eric Fehrnstrom is right that incumbent congressmen with big campaign bank accounts -- all of them white, male Democrats -- would have an unfair advantage in the special election to replace Kerry that Senator Edward M. Kennedy is urging the Legislature to adopt.
But do we believe Romney's spokesman when he says that his is not a partisan interest but a worry that ''women and people of color are shut out of the process"? Not anymore than we believe that Kennedy's concern is more about letting the voters decide than securing Democratic control of the Senate.
Sometimes it isn't convenient to practice what we preach. Sometimes we can even get away with it. (On Kerry's seat: Romney can credibly accuse the Democrats of a power grab; Democrats can reasonably respond that Romney is depriving the voters of a voice.) But Democrats will be strung up by their own hypocrisy if they continue to suggest that there is nothing wrong with an all-white, all male congressional delegation as long as it looks out for the interests of women and minorities. If Charles Stith -- Boston minister, community leader, and former ambassador to Tanzania -- wants a place at the table, the Democratic establishment should be pulling out a chair to seat him.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com.