With two weeks left in her term, longtime Democratic Party Chairwoman Kathy Sullivan sent a detailed memo to the nearly 200 voting members of the Democratic State Committee Friday explaining the different ways the party's constitution could be amended or its rules suspended to allow Raymond Buckley to be elected chairman March 24.

Buckley, of course, went from leading candidate for chairman to suspect in a child-pornography investigation to exonerated victim of a political attack to leading candidate again, all in nine weeks. The remarkable arc just about concluded last week when Jim Craig, who stepped in as the top brass's choice after Buckley exited, stepped aside to enable Buckley's return.

Ahem - that's the sound of Rep. Betty Hall, who'd like to remind everyone that there's still a race.

"I entered that race in good faith to raise the issues, and I'm going to continue to do that right down to the end," said Hall, 85, a 14th-term lawmaker from Brookline. "It will be up to the voters to see which direction they want to go in the future."

Hall, a retired business owner and nonprofit leader, entered the race to give people a choice. "Carol Shea-Porter's election and especially her primary race (against Craig) show how far apart the powers that be in the party and the grass roots really are," Hall said. "I have the energy and drive to get out to those grass roots and make them feel welcome."

Hall said it would be bad form for state committee members to change election rules on election day. She also thinks the party should copy state election law and hold secret-ballot voting, a subject she blogged about last week on the website of Democracy for New Hampshire, a nonpartisan progressive group that grew out of the Howard Dean movement.

Sullivan addressed that point in her memo: The Democratic National Committee mandates open balloting for state party elections, and the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld that party bylaws trump state laws for party proceedings. "Much as any of us would like to have secret ballots, our bylaws require an open election," Sullivan told us.

Sullivan acknowledged Hall's candidacy in her memo but said nearly every member she had surveyed wanted Buckley to be allowed to run.

Good soldier

A lot of people were feeling sorry for Craig after he folded his campaign to make way for Buckley.

Craig, who was pushed into running by Gov. John Lynch after Buckley's troubles began, never wanted the chairman's job in the first place. But he stepped up and then spent weeks calling many of the state's 200 Democratic committee members to get their support.

Craig's exit from the chairman's race came six months after he lost a primary race to Shea-Porter. Craig, the former House Democratic leader, was the pick of most of the party leadership, but Shea-Porter won by 20 percentage points.

"My friends tell me these things come in threes," Craig told us. "So I think I might lay low for the next few months."

So it begins

Sen. John McCain, winner of the 2000 Republican primary, will make his first visit to the state in 2007 next weekend, complete with the old "Straight Talk" bus.

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