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04/04/2006: "My District Political Convention"
Spent this last Saturday at the 61st District DFL convention. I had a blast. I am one of those totally deranged people that actually enjoy these things. What I enjoy is seeing old friends. Yea the DFL has its share of jerks, but even the jerks are a joy to see if I haven’t seen them in a while. I saw the woman who beat me when I ran for the legislature, and I gave her a big hug. In retrospect, she probably saved my life.
Anyway, what I want to talk about is the walking sub caucus. I have decided that I HATE IT. It was the only unpleasant part of the entire day. The irony is, that I thought it was a great victory when we got it. Here is a little bit of history.
During the Vietnam war, the McCarthy and McGovern campaigns the party seemed to be very hard to influence. There were party “hacks” who got elected to delegate and central committee and other positions time after time. We had a “winner takes all” selection method which meant that if you had just one vote over 50% of those at a convention, and could keep your people disciplined, your slate of delegates were all elected. This caused us to organize.
In 1968, I remember we had a majority. Long term people who had not missed a State Convention in decades all of a sudden were frozen out. We elected our slate, but even I could see that it wasn’t fair, it was politics.
Many meetings, task forces and committees later, the “Iowa walking subcaucus” system was implemented. This system must be used if a small number of members of any convention wants it. In reality, this means that it is almost always used.
What happens is that we break out into the most rarified stratified and narrow group we can, and only meet with those people we completely agree with. You can call a Laurie for Governor, Bell for Senator, Palmeyer for Congress, Peace, Gun Control, GLBT, environment sub caucus, and someone else will call the Laurie for Gov, Bell for Senator, Ellison for Congress, Peace and Justice sub caucus. Each of these two sub caucuses will compete for bodies and elect the number of delegates they are allocated based upon their numbers.
You see, I believe that politics is the science of making decisions TOGETHER. If you are only talking to people you agree with, then your politics are pretty narrow.
Also running for delegate this way is unpleasant. You are not trying to convince are argue for your positions in your campaigning, you are trying to prove who is a greater “true believer”. I don’t like it, I didn’t like it. It doesn’t work to bring new people in, it doesn’t work to support experienced people, and it doesn’t work to represent each other well. It just doesn’t work.
I wish we could come up with a way to elect delegates that kept us together, that forced all of the people in the party to work as a unifying force. I want to hear from the people who support other people than I do. In fact, in many of the races I do not have a candidate, I have a “short list” of acceptable candidates. I certainly am not “uncommitted” but I am open. The part is too fractionalized as it is, and we should have a process that forces us to struggle with each other over our differences. How can we govern effectively without that?
I am proposing that a modified IRV, system be allowed that would enable us to keep the proportional voting but have us make the decisions together. Everyone gets nominated from the body, each person who wants to be a delegate submits a short statement to the body, and then we vote in some kind of weighted IRV type of system to be calibrated by computers. We would probably have to use optical scanners but I think it might be faster. I would love to work on this with some other people if we think it makes sense