Michael Graham has been tracking the comings and goings of New Hampshire politics for a while so it’s only natural that he’d be on the lookout for some of the more unusual stories up there during the midterms. I’m guessing that nobody saw this one coming, though. A fight has broken out between some of the congressional candidates in the Democratic Party over one of the last subjects you would suspect. Confederate Civil War monuments.

Wait a minute. Aren’t the Democrats all on the same page when that subject comes up? Possibly not. Or at least not entirely. (Inside Sources)

After one of her Democratic competitors compared her to “Neo-Nazis and Southern Revivalists,” N.H. congressional candidate Maura Sullivan issued a statement to NHJournal.com clarifying her statement that she believed states should decided for themselves if statutes and other memorials to the Confederacy were appropriate.

In a televised interview over the weekend, Sullivan–a candidate in the Democratic primary to replace retiring liberal congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter– was asked about her work on the American Battle Monuments Commission and her position on Confederate monuments and memorials. “Do they deserve to remain standing?” she was asked.

Rather than condemning their display, Sullivan simply said “That is an issue for states and local communities to decide for themselves.”

So Ms. Sullivan isn’t exactly sounding like a Georgia Peach who chairs meetings of the Nathan Bedford Forrest Appreciation Club Auxiliary. All she actually said was that the matter of Civil War monuments should be left up to the communities which have them. Really controversial, eh? Apparently so. One of the other Democrats running against her immediately released a statement saying that she, “sounds like every Neo-Nazi and Southern Revivalist I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter.”

Whoa! You’re playing the Nazi card because someone dared suggest that communities control their own cultural and historic displays? Doesn’t that seem just a tad harsh?

Apparently it worked because Sullivan “clarified” her answer to include a call for the removal of all such monuments. (You can read the full statement at the link.) She didn’t originally say anything of the sort, but the sharks can smell the blood in the water and Sullivan is clearly in damage control mode. Of course, that’s the state of the Democratic Party today. Everyone has to be in lockstep on social issues and the slightest variation from the script will see you taken out behind the woodshed.

But look on the bright side, Democrats. Now you have something else to campaign on besides Trump!