Did anyone go to the Iowa Democratic Party’s state convention today?
Use this as an open thread to talk about what happened there.
UPDATE: John Deeth liveblogged the convention for Iowa Independent.
Chet Culver donated $100,000 from his campaign committee to the “coordinated campaign” that will get out the vote for all Democrats in Iowa this November.
The organized labor community is still mad at Culver for vetoing the collective bargaining bill this spring, as this curtain-raiser by the AP’s Mike Glover confirms.
The solution is to elect more Democrats to both chambers of the legislature, which the coordinated campaign will help do. With solid Democratic majorities, another collective bargaining bill can be passed in 2009, with a more open legislative process than what occurred this year.
3 Comments
convention
I went to the state convention this weekend. It was interesting–at least parts of it were, but very, very, very long.
We got there early, around 7:30AM because I wanted to beat the crowds. We did…actually the crowds never really came. Because of the floods and the date change, many people couldn’t be there and we barely met quorum. I think they drafted every person who walked into the room who said they were a democrat and made them a delegate.
Before the official beginning of the convention we met “informally” as preference groups. It was decided that we wanted to demonstrate unity to the rest of the country so all delegates elected that night would go as Obama delegates, but they would be elected proportionally from each of the preference groups so some people who were supporting Hillary and Edwards would get to go to Denver.
Then there were lots of speeches…some went on too long, but most were OK. Around noon we started talking about platform stuff. The platform had been sent out a month or so ago. We had one hour to read it, vote on it, and eat something for lunch. Rob Tully should have asked one of the elementary teachers to explain how to fill in the ballots. He didn’t explain it well and then just got mad when people asked for clarification. I think some people skipped the reading step of the platform and skipped right to lunch, because some of those people were getting done pretty darn fast. On the other hand, they could have done their homework.
Then we voted on the “controversial” planks. From a sociologist perspective, this was the most fascinating part. There were about 20 people who wanted to argue about each and every issue. Thankfully, discussion was limited to only 6 minutes per plank. At least 5 times during this someone would suggest suspending the rules so we could discuss it some more. Apparently “suspending the rules” requires a 2/3 majority–but actually it could have been a 1/3 minority and it would still never have happened. The only controversial planks were those flagged by the platform committee. None were discovered to be controversial by vote. By the way, we voted to legalize marijuana.
Interspersed between discussing issues we started the long, arduous task of voting for various offices. Female DNC, male DNC, Affirmative Action Chair, female elector, male elector. Democrat voting is funny. Apparently each person has to be elected with a real majority (over 50%) of the vote. When there are 8-12 people running for a single office, this never happens in 1 ballot. If a candidate gets less than 15% of the vote than he or she is kicked off the list. Then we vote again…and again…and again.
Since I’m pretty new to this, I didn’t know any of these people. At least for DNC members and Affirmative Action Chair we got to hear 1 minute speeches from everyone, so I had some idea. But for the electors, there were no speeches during the first round. So I pretty much voted blind. One guy suggested that we suspend the rules and choose the elector by lot…honestly that’s what I was doing anyway so it would have been fine with me. It wasn’t fine with Rob Tully though, he told the guy he was out of order. This may have been because Tully was running for position of elector. He didn’t get it though.
Finally, around 11:30 we got everyone elected that we needed to as a group, so we broke up into individual preference groups for delegates. In the Clinton group we had 13 women running for three delegate and one alternate spot. No men…only one male delegate was elected from the state convention and the Obama group got that one. This is because of gender balancing party rules and all of our elected officials are male (another good reason to get Becky Greenwald elected). To make a very long story short we voted again and again and again and finally picked them all. We finished at about 2:30 AM.
Despite the tediousness of some of it, I would be a delegate again. Next time though, here is what I’m going to bring: a cooler with soda and water in it, food, a book, an ipod, and a deck of cards. There is a lot of waiting around while ballots are being counted, and the snack stand closes well before the convention does.
lorih Tue 1 Jul 10:50 PM
I encourage you to post this as a diary
so that more people will read it.
Interesting account!
I heard from a friend who did not stay for the platform stuff that there were a lot of sad people in the Clinton delegates’ room as Tom Vilsack encouraged them to throw their support behind Obama.
desmoinesdem Wed 2 Jul 1:26 AM
Absolutely there were--
including me. The decision to unite was not unanimous. We still have a ways to go to heal the party. I think it will happen, and I intend to do everything I can to convince other Hillary supporters to vote for Obama, but it is going to take time.
lorih Wed 2 Jul 3:17 PM