PDA California Road Tour Rocks the Coast
By Mimi Kennedy, Chair PDA Board
April 30, 2006, San Fernando, CA
Dr. Bill Honigman, PDA Southern California organizer; Tim Carpenter, PDA Director; Lila Garrett, PDA Board Member; Rep. Barbara Lee, PDA Board Member; Mimi Kennedy, PDA Board Chair; Rev. Lennox Yearwood, PDA Board Member; Steve Shaff, PDA Board Vice Chair.
I don't know how many Board Chairs prepare for a five-day summit by washing their guest linens and putting all the extra leaves in their dining-room tables, but with six members of PDA's national team on the way to LA, and Mario Romero driving them between five cities in a van, it was bed-and-board in the San Fernando Valley. Hotels aren't that practical when you're blogging and strategizing into the wee hours; it's too long to get to and fro. We were "Organizing, Mobilizing and Delivering the Progressive Vote" at all hours, so not only did we save your donations for salaries and air fares, we picked up an extra one when my neighbor, solicited for an extra guest room, gave a contribution to PDA as well!
They arrived Tuesday, April 27. I met up with them--Executive Director Tim Carpenter, Deputy Director Kevin Spidel, Field Director Sherry Bohlen, Board Members Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Steve Cobble and Steve Schaff--in Mar Vista Park, in the district where PDLA President Marcy Winograd is running for Congress, challenging war hawk incumbent Rep. Jane Harman (self-described as "the best Republican the Democrats ever had") in the primary. Board Member Cindy Sheehan was there, too, with her sister Dede Miller and Code Pink ally Jodie Evans. A week earlier, Marcy had blocked Harman's endorsement by the party when the 36th district party delegates met. Marcy won over enough of them to deprive Harman of the 70% of votes needed to get the nod. In a district whose 2001 reapportionment made it safely--70%--blue, the progressive message is the one that will get through to the voters.
While Marcy's staff walked the precinct with Cindy Sheehan, the national team went to Beverly Hills to prepare for the fundraiser hosted by Marcy's mother, Teddi Winograd. Over 150 donors showed up to eat, drink, hear barn-burning speeches and share their views. Acting PDLA President Brad Parker began by introducing the local team. He cited the newly-coined "swarm theory" as a paradigm for progressive leadership, noting that scientists don't yet know how bees and ants conduct their detailed, sustaining activities without apparent leadership. The same way progressives do, he said. We see what needs to be done and self-organize, by our strengths, to do it. Tom Hayden, Tim, Cindy, Rev. Yearwood, Lila Garrett and Marcy brought the crowd to its feet for successive standing ovations. Sustainers who had not met the national team and donors who were entirely new to PDA reported being "blown away."
Afterwards, with take-out from El Cholo (Tim survives on Mexican food) over twenty who'd worked the event, including Erin Flynn and Carly Miller, came north with us to the Valley. My husband Larry blendered up some margueritas, burritos and chips-with-salsa multiplied like loaves and fishes, and my dining-room table, which has seen many a great family reunion, saw another one. We didn't have the same last names--and we agreed, instead of disagreed, on politics!--but PDA is family. And it was a great party.
Wednesday morning the national team met Marcy's campaign staff. Kevin Spidel, brought his experience with the Kucinich and Cegelis campaigns to the table. Rev. Yearwood and I broke off for a breakfast meeting with ICUJP leaders Rev. Louis Chase, Rabbi Steve Jacobs, Thia Stefan (formerly of the Kucinich campaign in LA) and Lisa Smithline, who is political director for filmmaker Robert Greenwald. ICUJP and Greenwald are staunch allies in PDA's inside/outside strategy. They discussed with Rev. Yearwood how they might help in his organizing of displaced Katrina victims to restore their political voice.
Orange County hosted us on Wednesday night. Emergency room physician Dr. Bill Honigman (Quick, doc! Constitutional emergency!) and O.C. leaders Marion Pack, Mary Carter and Diane Valentino, along with PDA-backed congressional candidate Steve Young, hosted with style and humor (Minuteman Tacos!) PDA Board Member John Bonifaz, in a night away from his campaign for secretary of state in Massachusetts, gave a fiery analysis of the constitutional mandate for impeachment that brought the crowd to its feet. Rev. Yearwood gave another room-rocking exhortation. PDA-endorsed congressional candidate Jeeni Criscenzo and Doug Hunter came up from North San Diego, where another PDA chapter is forming.
It was another late night in the Valley afterwards, with more discussion and strategy, face-to-face and via e-mail. And more (there is never enough) Mexican food.
While I stayed in LA to prep for the state Democratic convention, the team went to Santa Barbara, where Jon Williams, Brett Wagner and Stacey Shepherd hosted a fundraiser. Tim, Kevin and the Rev briefed and roused the Santa Barbara PDA chapter that "is strong and growing stronger"--to quote Steve Schaff, whose fundraising and business expertise strengthens our board. Steve's mission on the California tour, he told me, was to judge for himself whether, on the ground, PDA had people in sufficient numbers, with sufficient passion and persistence, to assure the organizational viability big donors demand.
He said the answer he got--from LA to Orange County to Santa Barbara to Sacramento to San Francisco--was a resounding yes. It was beyond anything he'd imagined possible for PDA to create in the year-and-a-half of its existence.
PDA's presence at the state convention this year had an irrefutable power and magnetism. There were always crowds around our table. Last year a coalition of several progressive groups, with Tim's driving leadership, got an anti-war plank into the platform. In the intervening year, that coalition launched the Progressive Caucus, co-founded by PDLA's Parker over the objections of some state party leaders. The P.C. held an Impeachment Forum that hundreds enthusiastically attended, and in the platform, the language on election protection came directly from my year-long efforts for PDA, in coalition with others in California, to learn, then teach, how privatized software creates high-tech Jim Crow. But the emotional highlight--for progressives and the party machine--was Marcy Winograd's challenge to Rep. Harman on the convention floor Sunday. Saturday night PDA had followed the by-laws, collecting over 300 convention delegate signatures (despite the party's warning, "Decline to sign!" which many frowning delegates repeated to us) to re-open the question of Jane's endorsement by the district convention delegates in a closed meeting Saturday afternoon.
Willie Brown conducted the floor vote that would settle the question. The voice-vote was too close to call, so he counted cards held up by the voting delegates. Heavy lobbying to toe the party line, including a letter from LA Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa that had been so hastily computer-generated that it was full of misspellings, led to a victory for Harman in the vote. But Marcy had made it a contest despite party pressure. And her passionate anti-war message echoed that of keynote speaker Max Cleland, who only half-an-hour before had been given a standing ovation by those delegates who, in the name of party unity, held up their cards for a Congress member who votes with the Republicans who smeared Max Cleland and cost him his re-election.
Thanks to the effort of Dr. Bill Honigman, Anna Givens, and Mervis Reissig, PDA State Coordinators for California, and our other chapter members who worked so hard and gave so freely of their time, the whole tour was a huge success.
I leave you with this mental image: Tim, giving a radio interview over his cell phone. He stood outside on the patio beyond the glass doors behind the PDA table for better reception. At one point, the many other delegates who'd been outside enjoying the sunshine came inside, fleeing an approaching swarm of bees. Tim simply walked to a corner of the ledge, bowed his head, and continued his interview as the air thickened and the bees, in a huge cloud, passed just above him. He didn't want to interrupt his conversation by risking loss of signal. "Swarm theory" at work--his job was that interview, and he kept doing it. The bees left him alone. They passed over and moved on.
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