This is Saturday, the "main event" for the 2002 California Democratic convention, held here in Los Angeles.
I'm attending with the candidate for the Congress from the 24th district of California, Fern Rudin. We're not delegates and therefore cannot vote. So, we timed our arrival this morning to arrive and catch some of the speakers. We got there just in time to hear Tom Daschle, Majority Leader of the Senate. There he was, up on the podium and also being projected onto two huge screens. We were invited by the 10th district, but there was only a chair for Fern. I stood along the wall and drank it all in. I guess my "campaign" credential carried a bit more weight than the regular "delegate" badges because time and again the ushers would come down the wall and ask all the other people to please find a seat. Me? Me they left alone. But finally I spied a seat with the 20th district and I took it.
Instead of trying to repeat the speeches (which you can read elsewhere), I'm just going to try to explain the camaraderie and sense of belonging that I felt. There were a couple of thousand Democrats in the Bonaventure today and we were a very diverse group. Besides just having different shades of skin color, we represented a wide range of ages, both genders and many religious backgrounds (I especially enjoyed seeing the man with what I believe to be "Sikh" headdress enjoying ice-cream at the Jewish Democrats' social.) People from all over this great state were gathered to endorse candidates, outline a platform, conduct party business and generally mingle together and draw strength from the group.
Later, I walked through the booths that were setup outside the hall and signed up at the CARAL booth for some pro-choice literature and they even gave me a shirt. There were lots of politicians and vendors. My favorite thing was a button with GW's face stretched to look like Alfred E. Newman and the words "What? Me worry about the environment?"
All day long, we stopped and spoke with people to let them know who Fern was and what was going on up in our newly redrawn district. How she's facing an incumbent with vast sums of corporate and PAC money and how we still think Fern has a chance. All day long we received suggestions on where we might find help and how we might get out the word about Fern.
And then, almost before I knew it, it was over. All the speeches, all the applause all the voting and meeting and eating and caucusing and partying. All over. We saw hundreds of people make passionate pleas for their candidate for this office and that office. We saw leaders from around the country stop what they were doing and come to California to address us. We spoke of issues like reproductive rights and the right to have our votes counted. We lamented how the Republicans plundered our budget surplus and gave us deficits for years to come. And throughout it all, we felt the pride of belonging and the knowledge that we are not alone in caring, passionately, about what happens to our fellow men and women.
My part was easy. Little more than a glorified observer with a higher-access pass. I helped Fern with her campaigning and tried to take it all in. This was my first political convention, although I grew-up in a VERY politically active family. I'm still a little afraid of being swept away by the open-ended scope of the struggle at hand. But I am one of those people who believe that individuals can make a difference and so it is with that optimism that I anticipate the coming elections and the good that we may wrought.
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