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More on the Sour Taste – And How It Can Be Sweeter

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I thought I’d give a little bit more detail about what happened at the end of the convention, which ended with a quorum call and an abrupt close to business.

Let me first say that I do not have this inflated sense about the importance of CDP resolutions.  They reflect the spirit and the passion of the activist community of delegates, but they are not pieces of legislation that can be enforced.  They are a nice endorsement for certain issues, and the delegates can feel like they have done something.  But they are not binding.  It has to amuse me, in a cynical way, that this entire brouhaha is over a nonbinding resolution on Iraq, brought to you by many of the same people who decried the Congress’ nonbinding resolution on Iraq.

That said, I do think it’s a serious issue from the standpoint of small-d democracy and the ability for the will of the delegation to be expressed, as well as what it bodes for the real structural reforms that are needed in the party.

On the flip…

The facts of the situation are this.  There were 13 resolutions voted on at the convention on the final day.  This was the very last business done on the floor, and this is fairly typical in an off-year (endorsements, I believe, sometimes come after the resolutions).  We’ve gone over how the resolutions committee did a lot of the work on resolutions before anyone ever got to the convention, making rulings on the 104 resolutions submitted, and in some cases tabling, referring, or directing resolutions as out of order.  Eventually the 104 were whittled down to the 13 that went to the floor, the result of many meetings and compromises.

Now, the progressive grassroots, led by PDA (Progressive Democrats of America), really focused their attention on an impeachment resolution.  They would maybe say otherwise, but it is undeniable.  They worked their tails off and mobilized dozens of supporters to carry banners, flyers, signs, to sit in every committee meeting.  They whipped their people up into a frenzy over it.  Added to this outside strategy was an inside strategy, using former members of the Resolutions Committee as a liaison to hammer out compromise language that could get the resolution to the floor.  They succeeded on their main goal; an “investigations toward impeachment” resolution passed.  This was really something of a small miracle, and the result of hard work and serious grassroots action.

But there was a price.  All of the energy put into the impeachment resolution took away from many of the other priorities of the Progressive Slate, priorities on which I ran – single-payer health care, clean money, election protection, net neutrality.  None of these made it out of committee.  Privately, some high-profile PDA members were very angry about this series of events.  They considered it wrong to ditch these other important proposals to put all the eggs in the impeachment basket.  I would add the 58-county strategy and the Audit Committee proposals to that, which were remanded to a task force for study, despite the fact that a significant number of signatures were collected to bring it to the floor (it couldn’t because of that new rule about resolutions which are referred or tabled not allowed to go through that process).  Chairman Torres appointed some of the main leaders in creating the Audit Committee proposal to the task force, and seemed sincere in his vow to abide by the wish to look at how the CDP funds races.  Stay tuned on that.

Resolutions on Iraq fell somewhere in the middle.  The Chairman of the Party and Senate leader Perata had a vested interest in getting the delegates to endorse their language on the Out of Iraq initiative, scheduled to move through the legislative process and onto the February ballot.  Here’s the key text:

BE IT RESOLVED, that the California Democratic Party wholeheartedly supports the following statement: “The people of California, in support of the men and women serving in the Armed Forces of the United States, urge President Bush to end the US occupation of Iraq and immediately begin the safe and orderly withdrawal of all United States combat forces; and further urge President Bush and the United States Congress to provide the necessary diplomatic and non-military assistance to promote peace and stability in Iraq and the Middle East; and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that the California Democratic Party urges other states to follow suit unifying our country in its absolute desire to see an immediate end to the Iraq War and sending the strongest possible message to President Bush and the Republican presidential candidates.

Perata wants to take the resolution to other states as well.  And certainly there’s a benefit in forcing state Republicans and the Governor to have to take a position on Iraq before 2008 (if the state party uses those votes).  But the point is that the party leaders had a vested interest in keeping the Perata resolution clean, without amendments.

But four amendments were offered on the floor.  Any delegate can pull the resolution and move to amend, and those amendments are then voted on in turn.  It happened with a few of the other resolutions (all the amendments failed, I believe).  On this one, two amendments added more specific language; one to cut off funding totally for the occupation of Iraq, and another to de-authorize the legislation that took the country to war.  A third amendment changed “Republican presidential candidates” to “all Presidential candidates,” and a fourth tried to insert language abut Iran.  The fourth one was immediately ruled out of order and not germane.

On the others, the progressive grassroots and the Party leaders forged a compromise that, if it had succeeded, would have had everyone going home with a smile on their face.  The Perata bill would go forward without amendment; but then the two substantive amendments, on cutting funding and de-authorization, would become separate resolutions that could be debated and voted on immediately thereafter.  Chairman Torres had to suspend the normal rules regarding resolutions to make this happen, and it showed an effort to offer the best of both worlds.  Sen. Perata gets his bill endorsed by the Party, and the progressives get their resolutions the full force of passage.  A cheer went up in the crowd when this happened.  A lot of goodwill was gained in that moment.  PDA and their allies would have gone home meeting their goals on Iraq and impeachment, which would not have been expected.

And then, in a moment, it was gone.

Karen Wingard, a regional director from Southern California, in association with Ted Smith, a member of the Resolutions Committee, called for quorum.  The rest here:

Someone called for a quorum on the presumption that there wouldn’t be a quorum, so no more debate could be conducted and business would be over.  When the quorum call was made, they immediately started counting–I barely had time to run from the blogger table back to my region–much less anyone from the hallway.

A lot of people are upset about this–there are people who are saying they expect parliamentary crap like this to be pulled by the Republican party, not by Democrats.

A quorum is 1155, and there are only 623 delegates.  No more business can be conducted.  The convention is over and we can only hear reports.

All of the goodwill of the previous several minutes was lost.  People predisposed to believe the worst about the Party leadership was given the excuse they needed to believe it.

But this didn’t appear to be an inside job.  Chairman Torres and the leadership wouldn’t have negotiated such a compromise in the first place knowing that it would be sabotaged, would he?  It made things so much worse, I cannot imagine why he would think to do that.  And people we talked to afterwards said that the Chairman was genuinely shocked by the turn of events.  Once quorum is called, counting must go on; he cannot overturn a bylaw, only a rule.  So the die was cast.

Anyone can make a quorum call.  The reasons for it can only be speculative on my part.  Calitics calls on those who pursued this divisive strategy to subvert small-d democracy and silence the will of the remaining delegates to come forward and explain exactly why they felt the need to do so.

The other thing that must be discussed here is that the underlying structure of the convention lends itself for this kind of thing to happen.  Resolutions are done last, and in this example, this was the last resolution discussed.  There were less reasons for delegates to stay as the day wore on.  If the resolutions are supposed to reflect the spirit of all the delegates, it seems to me that the Party could make a good-faith effort to not make them an afterthought by putting them dead last.

Like I said, resolutions aren’t bound with the force of law.  But they mean something on at least a spiritual level to a great many activists and people who bring so much energy and effort to the Party.  Furthermore, the suspicion that there isn’t enough transparency in how the Party does business is already there.  This “sour taste” allowed many progressives to believe everything they already wanted to believe.  We have an opportune moment in America, where new activists are interested and excited by the prospect of real progressive change, and are getting involved for the very first time.  The CDP needs to respect and honor that.

Our next steps in the progressive movement are to continue to work within the system, PRIORITIZE AND UNIFY, connect and communicate and grow, polish up on our Roberts Rules of Order, win more AD elections and County Committee slots, elect candidates that will appoint progressives, sit on the task force that can ensure a 58-county strategy and financial transparency, and make sure that those who would rather stifle debate than lead are held accountable.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

I gave the first campaign speech of my life last night

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Let’s get the particulars out of the way.  I’m dday, in the real world I answer to Dave Dayen, and I, like hekebolos, am running for CDP (California Democratic Party) delegate this weekend.  In fact, there are over 20 progressive bloggers running for CDP delegate slots all across the state.  My district, AD 41 (the fightin’ 41st), stretches along the coast from Santa Monica all the way up to Oxnard.  There’s a map here.  The 41st AD caucus meeting is on Saturday, January 13th at 10 a.m., at the Malibu Library, located at 23519 Civic Center Way (Mapquest it).  If you or someone you know is a registered Democrat in my district, I’d be honored to have you (or them) vote for me and the entire Progressive Slate.  The full details are at this DFA link.

But what I want to tell you about is my experience last night, where I gave the first campaign speech of my entire life, and how I have the blogging community to thank for the results.

So MoveOn.org is doing this “Mandate for Change” campaign, where members get people in their community to sign “photo petitions”.  Instead of just signing a petition asking for bold leadership on major issues (Iraq, health care, clean energy, restoring democracy through election reform) and sending it to your Congresscritter, in this campaign people are asked to take a picture holding up a personal message for their Congresscritter.  Then we’ll hold personal meetings with the Congresscritters or their staffs and hand-deliver the photos of their constituents asking them for change.  It’s a nice little idea.  Here’s a flickr photo set of hundreds of these photo petitions.

My local MoveOn chapter (yes, they have chapters now) held a meeting yesterday to discuss the photo petition project.  I’ve been fairly active in this campaign and with this particular chapter, so I attended.  I also printed up a bunch of flyers about my election on Saturday to distribute to the group.  We ended up having about 35 people at the meeting.

I actually had a separate role to play at the meeting, to lead the discussion about the latest part of the Mandate for Change campaign, which is a drive to write letters to the editor (not astroturfing, but ACTUAL grassroots action!).  So I went ahead and discussed that, and gave my thoughts on how to get a good LTE published (key point: less use of the phrase “ignorant MSM fuckhead” increases chances of publication).  And right after that, the meeting organizer said, “And Dave also has something exciting that you can get involved in this weekend, and that’s his election for CDP delegate.  Care to tell us about that?”

This wasn’t totally unexpected, but also not expected to the extent that I prepared anything.  But in a way, I’ve been preparing since roughly 2002.  This community and the progressive blogosphere is an incubator for ideas and framing and ways to relate your message.  I knew why I was running (in fact, I wrote about it right here).  The California Democratic Party is an invisible institution that comes around for two weeks every two years and places election ads.  Other than that, they’re a nonentity.  Here’s what I wrote then:

I’ve lived in California for the last eight years.  I’m a fairly active and engaged citizen, one who has attended plenty of Democratic Club meetings, who has lived in the most heavily Democratic areas of the state in both the North and South, who has volunteered and aided the CDP and Democratic candidates from California during election time, who (you would think) would be the most likely candidate for outreach from that party to help them in their efforts to build a lasting majority.  But in actuality, the California Democratic Party means absolutely nothing to me.  Neither do its endorsements.  The amount of people who aren’t online and aren’t in grassroots meetings everyday who share this feeling, I’d peg at about 95% of the electorate. 

I mean, I’m a part of both those worlds, and I have no connection to the state party.  I should be someone that the CDP is reaching out to get involved.  They don’t.  The only time I ever know that the CDP exists is three weeks before the election when they pay for a bunch of ads.  The other 23 months of the year they are a nonentity to the vast majority of the populace.

And this has a tremendous impact.  The state of California is hardly deep blue.  It’s had Republican governors for 80 out of the past 100 years.  The last time the Democratic Party meant anything to California’s citizens was in the time of Alan Cranston and Pat Brown in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Democratic Club movement began, and when the state party was most involved with the grassroots.  At the time, the party was committed to progressive values and offered a real politics of contrast to move the Democratic brand in the state forward.  This has receded in the past 30 years.

But it’s actually worse than all that.  The Republican Governor of this state is getting a lot of publicity this week for submitting a universal health care proposal that essentially says: “I won’t rest until everybody in this state is paying for really crappy coverage!”  The plan doesn’t go far enough in addressing cost containment, forces people to buy insurance without defining what “basic coverage” is, provides a cheap opt-out of providing coverage for employers, and basically maintains the same system where greedy insurers get rich off the backs of the citizens of this state.  Most solid progressives, like my state senator Sheila Kuehl, understand this.  There are only two figures statewide who have had nothing but good things to say about the governor’s proposal.  They are Don Perata, Democratic leader in the Senate, and Fabian Nuñez, Democratic leader in the Assembly.  It’s a curious way to negotiate.

That’s because the state party and its top officials are primarily interested in maintaining the status quo.  They have incumbency protection through redistricting, are slathered with special interest money by being in the majority, and have no desire to upset that apple cart.  This is EXACTLY why membership in the CDP is slipping.  They work around the margins and do generally a decent job, but they have no leadership on the big issues, and no connection to the grassroots progressive movement that attracts ordinary citizens and lets them know that the Democratic Party is working in their interests.

So it’s with this as background, that I began to say a few words about the election.  And it became entirely clear to me that I was actually making a campaign speech.  I was talking about the need to build a movement from the bottom up and not the top-down.  I was talking about how the national agenda is important, but what happens in your own backyard really matters, especially in a state like California, which oftentimes sets the agenda for the rest of the nation to follow.  I was talking about the need for bold, progressive leadership, to make the CDP more responsive, more effective, and more relevant.  I was talking about the Governor’s health care proposal and how we need a credible alternative.  I was talking about how we had to wrest the party away from the narrow-cast, special interest-driven agenda of the current leadership and return it back to the people, about how we have to compete everywhere in the state and not just where we have large majorities.

And I realized that I have written about all of these things at one point or another.  I’ve internalized the concepts and sharpened my dialectic to a knife’s edge.  I’ve tried arguments, seen them rise or fall, seen people agree or disagree, and tried them again.  I’ve been running this speech through in my head since I first discovered blogs in 2002.  It came out so naturally and easily, that I have to conclude that the blogosphere is the greatest primary campaign that any candidate has ever experienced.

Now, this was a friendly audience made up of MoveOn members.  But I’m fairly certain that a bunch of them had about as much of a relationship to the CDP as most of the rest of the state, which is to say none, before that speech.  But before I even got around to saying “I’d like your vote, and I have some flyers here with all the information,” one of them asked, “How can I get involved?”  Then another.  They were really interested in the process and surprised that they didn’t know about the election at all.  I sent around the flyers and got commitments from a bunch of people to come out and vote.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that one of the people at the meeting was a fellow colleague on the Progressive Slate, Ellis Perlman, a retired political science professor with an incredible array of knowledge about state politics, and a desire to see change.  He spoke as well and he was fantastic on giving the history of grassroots movements in the state, and the need to check runaway executive power – sound familiar? – with a robust legislature committed to offering real alternatives.)

Upon leaving to go to the crappy night job I have this week (I didn’t get home until 5:30AM last night, so forgive me if this is rambling), I reflected on how this speech and this moment changed me.  In a way it was both a culmination and a beginning.  If we’re ever going to change America, all of us need to understand that democracy demands participation.  Online activism of the “I did something for the movement!  I clicked SEND!” variety is nice and all, but it’s ultimately insufficient.  I’m comfortable with public speaking but not necessarily with being a leader.  But what I took away is that we all have the capacity to lead, to call for change, to be a part of this progressive movement all across the country.  All it takes to do so is the will.  You can create the opportunity.