This is something I’m just whipping together on my own.  But based on the feedback on what I’ve been writing about the California Election Day campaign and some additional offline requests, there seems to be a desire to get together at this weekend’s CDP executive board meeting in Anaheim and go over what went right and what went wrong.  So, I’m taking ownership of this.

We can do it on Saturday, though I have no idea when or where.  The meeting is located at:

Sheraton Park Hotel at the Anaheim Resort

1855 S. Harbor Blvd.

Anaheim, CA 92802

I’m looking over the agenda, and the best time would probably be during the social from 5:30-8pm, but I wouldn’t be able to personally attend.  Otherwise, we’d have to do it during committee meetings, caucuses, or lunch.  Lunch might work best, actually, between 12:00-1:30.

I’m making this open-source, so I’ll cede to everyone’s best judgment.  Comment here on when you’d like to do this and if you can attend.  Also what you would like to see covered.  And of course, we’re going to have to find a place for this as well.  There is a coffee shop inside the Sheraton called Cappuccino Cafasia that might work, as well as Molly’s Kitchen, also at the Sheraton.  And there’s an IHOP across the street!

Please get this out to your lists so I can get some feedback.  Thanks.

I received a lot of feedback on my piece about the disappointing California election results and I want to thank everyone who participated.  A few points:

• The CDP has a version of Neighbor-to-Neighbor called Neighborhood Leader.  The program asks for a commitment from the activist to talk with 25 friends on multiple occasions throughout the year.  I don’t have metrics on it, which would be nice to know, but my suspicion is it needs to be expanded.

• There is a lot of back and forth about the extent of the ground game here in California.  Many have written in to talk about the field operation in key districts and field offices throughout the state.  Some have said that I overlooked this element, including all the doorhangers and phone calls made inside the state.  Others have told me that the calls tried to shoehorn too many messages into one (I did have experiences calling for multiple propositions and a candidate at the same time, which ends up shortchanging all of them) and that the results on the ground in general were unfocused.  And the insistence from some to talk about field elides the point.  Even if I grant that every targeted legislative campaign had the most aggressive and far-reaching field program in American history, the facts are that most of these campaigns lost, and so it’s time to come to terms with the fact that the type of organizing done in the state isn’t working.

• Some have suggested that Democrats, in fact, did not underperform the Presidential ticket in House races, but I think a lot of this is fun with statistics.  Yes, House Democrats in California may have done better than Barack Obama, but that would be because a substantial number of them had token or no competition.  Like 30 out of 53.  While on the chart at the link, it appears that California exceeded the Presidential numbers, the proof is in the lack of pickups despite a 24-point blowout at the top of the ticket.

• Other local organizers have the right idea.  I’m going to reprint this comment in full:

We ran a very intensive and very grassroots effort in Monterey County with more than 1000 volunteers (5 fold increase over 2004) that was by and large successful, got some newcomers into office and saved some progressive incumbents from conservative challengers.

We did all of this without CDP help.

We were offered use of the CDP voter database which in many ways was quite inadequate when it came to mapping and would have costed us money.  We were also offered 1000 doorhangers on Thursday before the election (we have 80,000 Democrats in Monterey County).

Instead we commissioned our own slate mailers and door hangers and mailed and hung 80,0000 and 30,000 respectively in conjunction with the local unions.  We used the VAN through CAVoterConnect for free with great results for us. We were able to manage our volunteers with it and we used it for all of our phone banking and Neighbor-to-Neighbor activities.

Here is what the CDP could have done – and can still do for future campaigns:

Support the VAN and help all local parties get access.  Help integrate State VAN with Obama VAN.

Conduct more capacity building, especially in how to run county-based campaigns, along the lines of Camp Obama but applied to state and local races.

Provide a template for door hangers that local parties can buy into instead of having to go out and design their own.

Work toward a more modular – bottom-up campaign.

Vinz Koller/ Chair/ Monterey County Democratic Party

I particularly want to emphasize the VAN, the California VAN is for some reason not integrated with the DNC’s Votebuilder program, which doesn’t make much sense to me.  There ought to be an effort to clean up all that idea in the off-year to get it ready for 2010.  Votebuilder is simply easier to work with and can be managed by volunteers.  And since there will be off-year elections this year, it can be test run.

• I don’t think I ever blamed the Obama campaign for draining the state of resources, but let me say again that I don’t.  In addition to many of the best volunteers leaving the state, many of the top organizers, including most of labor, left as well.  And Obama’s election was crucially important for a variety of reasons so you can’t blame them.

• Therefore, the biggest thing California Democrats can do to reverse this disturbing trend of the “political trade deficit,” sending money and organization elsewhere and never importing anything, is to argue for and pass the National Popular Vote plan, which would force locals to organize their own communities in a Presidential election.  If the Electoral College were offered as a system today, it would be found to be an unconstitutional violation of the principle of “one person, one vote” as determined by the 14th Amendment.  It shrinks the pool of competitive states down to a geographically significant battleground, and has made California irrelevant – again – as it has been for Presidential races for a generation.  A disruptive change like the National Popular Vote would go a long way to changing how campaigns are conducted in Presidential years in California.

Back in 2006, I and a lot of other grassroots progressives were angered that California showed little to no movement in its Congressional and legislative seats despite a wave election.  You can see some articles about that here and here, when I explained why I was running as a delegate to the state Party.  And frankly, I could rerun the entire article today, but instead I’ll excerpt.

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 […]

Only two Democrats in the entire state of California were able to defeat incumbents last November: Debra Bowen and Jerry McNerney.  Both of them harnessed the power of the grassroots and used it to carry them to victory.  They also stuck to their principles and created a real contrast with their opponents on core issues.  The only way that the California Democratic Party can retain some relevance in the state, and not remain a secretive, cloistered money factory that enriches its elected officials with lobbyist money and does nothing to build the Democratic brand, is by building from the bottom up and not the top down.  By becoming more responsive to the grassroots and more effective in its strategy, we can ensure that California stays blue, which is not a given.  This is a long-term process that is in its third year, and will not happen overnight.  But it’s crucial that we continue and keep the pressure on.

In 2008, we experienced that most anomalous of events, a SECOND wave election in a row.  Barack Obama won the biggest victory at the top of the ticket in California since WWII.  And yet, the efforts of downticket Democrats yielded only minimal success.  This is despite a decided improvement in the party in terms of online outreach and voter registration.  So something is deeply, deeply wrong with how they’re conducting campaigns.

I’m going to lay out the good, the bad and the ugly on the flip and make some suggestions as to what we must do to improve this for the future.

The Good

This wasn’t a wipeout at the downballot level.  The voters agreed with the Calitics endorsements on 8 of 11 ballot measures, with 1, Prop. 11, still too close to call.  We did manage, at this hour, a net gain of two Assembly seats, which could expand to three if Alyson Huber in AD-10 has some luck, and a gain of one Senate seat if Hannah-Beth Jackson holds off Tony Strickland in SD-19.  It is true that those numbers, 50 in the Assembly and 26 in the Senate, would be high-water marks for this decade.  And we came close in a few other seats that we can hopfully capture in the future.  In the Congress, we have thus far gained no ground, but a couple seats, CA-44 and CA-03, look well-positioned for the future, and with Bill Durston set to run for a third time, his increased name ID and the closeness of partisan affiliation in that district should make it a targeted seat at the national level.  

Voter registration was the driving factor here.  In red areas, Democrats did the leg work of registering thousands upon thousands of voters and making uncompetitive seats suddenly competitive.

The Bad

They forgot to turn those new voters out.

What shortsighted CYA masters like Steve Maviglio and Jason Kinney fail to understand, apparently, is the concept of opportunity cost.  When you have Barack Obama on the top of the ticket winning 61% of the vote, it is simply inexcusable to have gains that are this modest.  Maviglio doesn’t tell you that AD-78 and AD-80 were gerrymandered to be Democratic seats, so essentially we got back what was expected in the Assembly, and with a 106-vote lead, who knows what’s in store with SD-19.  The concept of a wave election is that such energy at the top of the ticket will necessarily trickle down.  And that’s what I based my initial projections on, that Obama would make “out-of-reach” seats suddenly competitive.  But he didn’t.  And there are two reasons for that: ticket-splitting and voters that stopped at the top, causing a significant undervote.  I don’t have numbers for Obama at the district level, so it’s hard to be sure about ticket dropping, but the ballot measures are generating about 600,000-800,000 less votes than the Presidential race or Prop. 8.

If you want a further analysis, djardin did a great analysis comparing Barbara Boxer’s share of the vote in 2004 in Assembly districts, when John Kerry was on top of the ballot, against the vote share from the Assemblymembers who were built for the district in 2008, with Obama.  The numbers are astonishing.

District Candidate       Boxer Vote      2008 AD Vote

*78 Marty Block                      57.9%               55.0%

*80 Manny Perez                   57.5%               52.9%

*15 Joan Buchanan               52.6%               52.9%

30 Fran Florez                 49.8%               48.3%

26 John Eisenhut                 48.6%              48.3%

10 Alyson Huber                 48.1%               46.2%

*pickup

In most of these races, the AD candidates are slightly underperforming the 2004 Boxer vote.  The exception is Joan Buchanan in Assembly District 15.   Buchanan may have been helped by demographic changes in the district.

It’s simply ridiculous that any district candidate would underperform the Boxer vote, after four years of incredible registration gains and a 61% performer at the top of the ticket.  It’s inexcusable, and nobody inside the party should be feeling good about missing out on the second wave election in a row.  These moments don’t happen often.  And these failures are what lead Yacht Party leaders like Mike Villines to crow about how “Republicans will still be empowered to protect Californians from higher taxes.”  He knows that he keeps dodging bullets and doesn’t have to worry about a backlash for his party’s irresponsibility.

These expectations are not unrealistic and this is NOT about gerrymandering, regardless of what fossils like George Skelton say.  Alyson Huber, Linda Jones and John Eisenhut had virtual parity in terms of registration in their districts.  Fran Florez had a much higher Democratic share.  Obama should have carried them to victory.  Thanks to him, Democrats took multiple state houses and made gains all over the country, in far more difficult circumstances.  There are systematic barriers to a progressive wave here right now.

So what is to account for this?  It’s important to note that the problems we saw with the No on 8 campaign should not be viewed in isolation.  They are a symptom of the poor performance of the consultant class here in this state.  No ground game?  Check.  Maviglio is crowing about the fact that they had a lot of volunteers on ELECTION DAY.  That’s too late.  Based on what I’ve heard, the CDP dumped all their door-hangers on the local parties, who had no volunteers to hand them out and instead relied on the Democratic clubs to do it.  That’s dysfunctional and disorganized.  Furthermore, that makes clear that no money was put into field – door knocking, phone banking, etc.  Instead, the consultocracy again relied on slate mailers and a modicum of TV ads, hoping the IE campaigns, which spent over $10 million, would take up the slack.  There was a low-dollar donor program, and it netted something like $200,000, which doesn’t pay for two days’ worth of spots, and it didn’t start until 8 weeks out.

There’s no sense of urgency, no notion of the permanent campaign.  Did ANY CDP messaging mention the yacht tax loophole?  Did they exploit the Republican budget, which was unnecessarily cruel?  Was the drive for 2/3 used as a banner across campaigns to frame a narrative on the election?  Were any issues put to use?  No.

Part of this is what I call our political trade deficit.  We export money and volunteers and get nothing in return.  The energy and effort put into the Obama campaign locally was impressive, but it didn’t translate into anything locally.  

California is a state that was expected to vote heavily for Obama. California donors accounted for perhaps 20% of his record-setting $640 million-plus. In the final days of the election campaign, Californians provided even more for the Democratic nominee: They volunteered.

Even though California was not a swing state, Californians still mattered. Some took leaves from work to knock on doors and traveled to the battleground states of Virginia, Colorado, Ohio and others. They even have a name, “bluebirds,” people from blue states who flock to Republican strongholds and swing states to help Obama’s campaign.

Jack Gribbon, California political director for Unite Here, the unions that include hotel and restaurant workers, oversaw an independent campaign focused on the swing area of Washoe County in the battleground state of Nevada. Knowing that Las Vegas and Clark County, in which the city is located, would probably vote for Obama, Gribbon sought to help swing the more conservative Reno-Sparks area toward the Democrat.

Using multiple voter lists, Gribbon targeted 16,000 voters, most of them with Spanish surnames, many of them Democrats and some of them newly registered.

It’s incredible that Californians can be so easily motivated to contribute to a national effort, which requires a lot of work on their behalf, picking up and moving across the country, but they cannot be tapped for a local ground game.

But I don’t blame Obama on this.  He’s trying to win an election.  It’s not his fault that he’s more charismatic or more of a volunteer magnet than the California Democratic Party.  The point is that the party has to supplement this, by working in off-years and early in the year to build a grassroots base.  And there’s a blueprint for this.  It comes from Howard Dean.  This was part of his memo after the election:

Governor Dean’s first step was to assess our Party’s strengths and weaknesses and put in place a strategy to address those issues.  Dean developed a business plan to rebuild the Democratic Party, modernize our operations and expand the electoral map.  The emphasis was on lessons learned and best practices, and it included the following key components:

·  Rebuild the Infrastructure of the Party – After assessing the needs on the ground, we hired full-time permanent staff in all 50 states, trained staff and activists, introduced new measures of accountability, and developed a unified technology platform. Over the past four years we’ve held 140 trainings for candidates, campaign staff, organizers, Party leaders and activists in all 50 states.

·  Upgrade and Improve the Party’s Technology/Modernize the Way We Do Grassroots Organizing –  Over the past four years the DNC has made significant investments in technology, creating a truly national voter file, improved micro-targeting models and developed 21st century campaign tools that merged traditional organizing with new technology.

·  Diversify the Donor Base – Shifting the emphasis of Party fundraising to include both small donors and large donors, the DNC brought in more than 1.1 million new donors and raised more than $330 million from ’05 – ’08. The average contribution over the last three years was $63.88.

·  Amplify Democratic Message and Improved Outreach – Created a national communications infrastructure to amplify the Democratic message and reach out to groups we haven’t always talked to and expand the map to regions where Democrats have not traditionally been competitive – including the South and the West.

·  Professionalize Voter Protection Efforts – Created a year-round national, state and local effort to ensure that every eligible voter has the opportunity to vote.  

Those are the bullet points, but the details are important.  Training and deploying full-time staffers throughout the state is very desperately needed.  They could implement a version of the Neighbor-to-Neighbor program that proved so successful nationwide.  The DNC voter file is an amazing tool that I have had the opportunity to use.  California, a leader in technology, ought to have the most comprehensive online database of its voters in the country, which we can use for micro-targeting and outreach to distinct communities.  And finally, this is about PERSONAL CONTACT AT THE STREET LEVEL.  Two years after I campaigned for delegate on a platform of making the party present in people’s lives year-round, not just at election time, that is still not a part of the picture.  This is why everybody walks away to go volunteer and donate elsewhere.  They have no connection to the state party, no interest in the state’s issues, and are in many ways contemptuous of the efforts of state politicians.  They haven’t been drilled on why the government is unmanageable thanks to the 2/3 rule, and they haven’t internalized the urgency of why that must be dealt with.

The silver lining is that these thousands of California-based volunteers, who learned organizing on the Obama campaign, could actually be channeled and put to use by the CDP if they chose to do so.  The role of the next state party chair in this effort is crucial.

Quite simply, what has been tried isn’t working.  In two election cycles with massive gains at the national level, in California we have crumbs.  Something is deeply wrong.  Something is broken.  And that must be fixed.  

Like many of you, I am increasingly worried about how an early call in the presidential race will affect turnout in California during the critical hours before the polls close. And I’m not encouraged by a giant No on 8 party starting at 6 PM and the email I received this morning that Jackie Speier’s election night party will start at 7:30 (polls don’t close until eight). When it comes to GOTV, volunteer all the way until the end, regardless of what went on in the east coast. That is why I love this new program by the California Democratic Party (from email):

Finally, think about all your friends and family in California who will share that joy with you. Is there a chance, even a small chance, that if they hadn’t voted by 6pm, people you know just might not vote at all? Maybe they’ll just be tired after a long day at work. Maybe they won’t be quite sure where to vote. Maybe they’ll see a long line at their polling place and figure “Obama’s gonna win California, so why bother?”

Help us make sure that your family and friends don’t give into temptation. Help us make sure your friends and family vote to defeat Propositions 4, 8 and 11 by sending them a quick text message.

Research shows that one of the easiest and most effective ways to get someone you know to vote on Election Day is to send a text message reminding them to vote. There is no better person to remind your friends and family to vote than you!

Use our free tool today to write an Election Day text message to your friends and family in California and we will send it to them for you on November 4th.

http://www.txtoutthevote.com/p/ca

Take a minute and set it up today. And spread the word.

The Republicans don’t want you to vote.

Across the country we have seen systematic efforts by the Republicans to intimidate and manipulate citizens to prevent them from voting for Barack Obama and the Democratic ticket. This has been a part of the Republican playbook for decades. It’s called voter suppression.

We’re already seeing it this year. Whether it’s overly restrictive voting laws that disenfranchise voters, or the McCain campaign sending absentee ballot applications to Democrats with the wrong return address. The Republicans don’t want you to vote. But we do.

If you’re eligible to vote and you want to vote, we hope that you will vote in this historic election for the Democratic Ticket.

Regardless of whom you are voting for Democrats have been fighting for years to ensure that every ballot of every eligible voter is counted as cast and I encourage you to:

• Check to make sure that you are registered to vote properly. In every election voters like you and me go to the polls expecting to vote, only to be told that their name has been removed from the voter rolls. Don’t let this happen to you. Even if you think you are registered, check your registration status here:

  http://www.votepoke.org

• Register to vote if you’re eligible and have never done so before. Your registration must be postmarked by Oct. 20th, which is this coming Monday. So don’t delay.

  http://www.cadem.org/registero…

• Re-register to vote if you’ve moved or have changed your name since you last registered. Again, you need to get the form in the mail by this coming Monday, October 20. Go here to find a form you can use to register:

  http://www.cadem.org/registero…

• Familiarize yourself with your rights as a voter. We have a list here:

  http://www.cadem.org/voterrights

• Send this on to your friends and family in California so that they can make sure they’re registered properly too.

[more on the flip]

You know, the Republicans are already anticipating a loss on Election Day. They are already huffing and puffing about supposed voter fraud.

However, the existence of “massive voter fraud” by Democrats is about as real as those weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to be in Iraq. Remember, President Bush fired a bunch of his own Attorneys General because they could find no evidence to support a partisan witch-hunt on this issue. The Republican leadership has hoodwinked a lot of good people, but for the leaders of the Republican Party, the red hearing of voter fraud is just an excuse to make it harder for legitimate voters to cast their ballot.

Sincerely,

Sen. Art Torres (ret.)

Chairman, California Democratic Party

P.S. We know that there’s going to be massive turnout this election. In the face of Republican-led vote suppression the best thing you can do to ensure your ability to cast a vote is to make sure that you’re registered to vote properly by going to http://www.votepoke.org and to familiarize yourself with your rights as a voter by going to http://www.cadem.org/voterrights.

(The man who would be Governor… – promoted by jsw)

Title updated.

When Republican State Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner announced with California Republican Party Chairman Ron Nehring on August 28, 2008 that he would contribute enough money to pay $5 for every new Republican voter registration, no one expected a voter registration card “slamming” program.  

In San Bernardino County the California Republican Party with their local Republican affiliates hired a firm from outside California called YPM – Young Political Majors, owned by a man named Mark Jacoby and run out of Florida and Arizona – to commit the same voter fraud that got YPM run out of other states.

(more on the flip)

Moreover, this isn’t something new. YPM has a bad track record stretching back years and years.  For example, the following story comes from an article written in 2004:

Young Political Majors LLC, or YPM, is a company registered by Mark Jacoby at a Town ‘N Country residence.

Jacoby appeared this summer at the election office in Gainesville with a box of about 1,200 voter registration cards. Of those, about 510 voters had switched to the GOP.

Elections Supervisor Beverly Hill spoke with Jacoby and grew suspicious. She randomly called the Republicans to verify they wanted to switch. All of them said, “Absolutely not,” Hill said. “They didn’t even know they had signed a registration form,” Hill said.

Here’s how YPM does it: their paid signature gatherers ask registered Democratic voters to sign a claimed legitimate petition (in this case a petition to “stop sexual predators from getting out of jail”). Then, depending on the circumstances, they tell the voter that the petition is not legal unless they re-register as a Republican, or they have the voter sign in two places – one of which is the bottom of a Republican voter registration card.

It is simply unacceptable for this type of activity to go on here in California.

“This insidious and fraudulent practice is called ‘slamming,’ and Insurance Commissioner Poizner must put an immediate stop to funding this conspiracy to commit fraud,” said Senator Art Torres (Ret.), Chairman of the California Democratic Party (see letter below letter).      

The San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters, Kari Verjil, has allowed the slamming to continue for weeks.  The California Democratic Party is calling on the San Bernardino County District Attorney’s office, the Secretary of State and the State Attorney General’s office to investigate and prosecute those who are knowingly committing fraud.  

The same situation is known to have occurred in Riverside County. This past August the Registrar of Voters, Barbara Dunmore, referred that fraud to the Riverside County District Attorney.

American voters should not be treated this way.

* * *

Here is a copy of the letter Chairman Art Torres sent to the San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters.

September 16, 2008

Via Facsimile (909) 387-2022

Ms. Kari Verjil        

San Bernardino County Registrar of Voters

Dear Registrar of Voters Verjil:

Our offices have received numerous calls about the California Republican Party’s use of “slamming” — illegally re-registering Democrats as Republicans — in your county.

I would like to know the status of your investigation of the Republican slamming.  A few thousand voter registration cards are being turned in each week to your office and it appears your office has not stopped this fraudulent practice.  

In calls to a random sampling of 100 of these voters, we found one-third of the phone numbers were either disconnected or the wrong number.

When phone slamming happened several years ago, the federal government, as well as state and local officials put a stop to it.  

You must stop this illegal practice whereby American citizens who have registered as Democrats, whether earlier this year or several years ago, are being changed to Republicans with your county voter registration cards by organizations authorized by you to do voter registration.

Sincerely,

Senator Art Torres (Ret.)

Chairman of the California Democratic Party

cc: Secretary of State Debra Bowen

    Attorney General Jerry Brown

    San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael Ramos

Last night, in one of the most shocking bits of incompetence in Republican National Convention history, John McCain spoke to America in front of what convention organizers must have thought was the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, but was actually Walter Reed MIDDLE SCHOOL in North Hollywood.  TPM has been all over this story today, and now they report that the CDP is stepping up on it.

One other interesting development: The California Democratic Party is actually holding a press conference in front of the school within minutes, where Dems will hit McCain for not knowing the difference between the school and Walter Reed Medical Center, which is believed to be the backdrop the McCain campaign really wanted.

Though multiple news organizations are asking for clarification, the McCain campaign is still refusing to comment on questions about whether it had hoped to use the medical center as a backdrop and accidentally used the school instead. Hard to blame them…

Good for the CDP for calling attention to this embarrassment.  Aren’t the Republicans supposed to be the ones who are good at stagecraft?  Hopefully Matt or someone will give us an update.

Well, yesterday was uneventful for me.  Just getting in and getting my bearings around the city.  The first thing I saw was a parade of four pickup trucks full of cops riding toward downtown.  

Later, a friend of ours took us down by the Platte River to a spot near the enormous REI store, where fire spinners congregate every Sunday night.  Afterwards, we stopped in on some vegetarian restaurant holding a poetry slam, and Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich were in there having dinner.  While most people in from out of town were eating their corporate-funded cocktail weenies, I stumbled upon some actual leftists for a change.  

While George Bush won Colorado by 4 points in 2004, John Kerry took Denver by 40.  This city grows more and more Democratic with each passing year, and raising turnout here – and keeping them in the Democratic fold – would be a key to victory in the state, I gather.

This morning, I’m sitting at the breakfast for the California delegation.  Hillary Clinton apparently cancelled today (she’ll be at the New York breakfast), but Speaker Pelosi will be on hand.  The big buzz of the convention (for today) is that Ted Kennedy has arrived in Denver and will be speaking tonight.  That should be pretty crazy.

UPDATE: While Lucas and I were sitting here bullshitting, Nancy Pelosi was apparently holding a press avail.  We’re good journalists.  Todd Beeton was there and he’s going to stop by and write it up.  I guess it was a litany of wanker traditional media scribes asking “Is there unity?  UNITY?  UNITY!!!1!????”

UPDATE: Speaker Pelosi has just taken the stage at the breakfast.  Lots of Congresscritters are here as well.  I may lose power here in a second.  Pelosi: “California will give Barack Obama and Joe Biden the biggest victory in the history of our country… the most votes ever for a Presidential candidate… are you ready to come together in unity and support Barack Obama and Joe Biden?… I bring this up because reporters ask me all day about this… but as we gather here… remember, it’s not just about us and what our feelings are about the campaigns.  It’s about the hopes, aspirations and challenges of the American people.  And they are looking to us to come out of this convention with unity, organized and focused to take this country in a new direction.  We owe them that… this is about our country.”

UPDATE: Pelosi: “If people want to talk about drilling offshore, don’t come around California with that kind of talk.  Let’s talk about the connection between oil, which belongs to the people, and the record profits from the oil companies, and how they take it out of the ground with no royalties (in California).”  Pelosi is talking about green jobs and renewables.

“If you’re a senior, and you care about Medicare, Obama is right and John McCain is wrong.  If you care about children’s health care, where George Bush said we can’t afford covering 10 million children for one year, which costs 40 days in Iraq, Obama is right and McCain is wrong… McCain supports George Bush’s failed economic policies… and on the most important foreign policy issue of our time, Iraq, Barack Obama is right and John McCain is wrong.”