As documented on the PDA website in "Democrats Need To Act Like the Opposition Party and Put Up a Fight," by Dianne Post and Barbara McCullough-Jones, helmed with grace and quick wittedness orchestration by Dan O'Neal, the meeting was a round robin of at-large calls to action. A veritable who's who of liberal activist causes in AZ, including "Arizona Institute for Peace, Education and Research (AIPER) and Radio Phoenix, the ACLU, NAACP, the Democratic Party, the Green Party, DFA, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Code Pink, Arizona Progress ACTION and the End War Coalition.
Combined, they proved thrilling to behold. Chairs lined back walls and people stood along the sides. The room buzzed with the power of ideas. Dynamic PDA speaker and leader Jeff Latas revved up the crowd to the point cheering and speechifying erupted spontaneously.
It was the one place where those rallying cries were seen as entirely unironic and/or non-delusional. And there were plenty of rallying cries to be had. I even spoke twice, muddled in garbled wishful thinking, first about acknowledging the importance of accepting the reality of the plutocracy and of figuring a way to market liberal ideas to plutocrats as a viable option to their current apparent preferred brand of rightwing oppression.
My other speech went something like:
"The Dem party needs to not lose sight of the fact that the youth of America does not support GOP ideas. They voted against the McCain-Palin brand of Bushco Redux in '08 by more than 24 million votes. This go-round, despite two disappointing years of failed Dem rhetoric and a forced fed diet of "Democratic party portrayed as ineffectual power-mad bomb-throwing commies" by the mainstream media, young voters still voted against GOP candidates and propositions by nearly 20%.
Unfortunately more than fourteen million of those young 2008 voters stayed home this go-round, dooming Dem chances because the Democrats dropped the ball for marketing their ideas. The progressives need to become as exciting a logo for Democrats as the GOP have been by co-opting the image of the Tea Party to symbolize their conservatism. We had the youth and lost them and we need to inspire them back again. The Dems need to look cool to young people or we won't get this thing fixed. And Dems are not going to energize a youth vote, or anyone else's vote, by insisting the brand be about old school moneyed politics as usual. That is exactly the stigma kids detest about the GOP. Kids want to believe in something, but we need to act like we believe in something more than fundraising."
I am sure i didn't say all of that that correctly, but i said my piece, gave it a shot. Kind people that they were, they let me finish the whole speech. And have no doubt, the populism was indeed popular. A lot of us came to speechify and there were a lot of great ideas. Like i said, it's a party, you know, good times, despite the fact they appeared to be thought of as an unwanted evil stepchild by the party leaders,
Oh wait, i forgot to mention that part ... turns out progressive smartasses don't play well with the establishment donkeys.
In fact, the ADP (Arizona Democratic Party--yes, those are the same letters as PDA, except in a different order) their leadership refused to grant the PDA a seat at the executive committee with the other caucus leaders and had even tangled for the helm of the state party back in Jan of '09, when progressive leader, former Pima County party chair Paul Eckerstrom handily defeated Bivens in a short-lived upset. As detailed in Stephen Lemon's New Times article, "Eckerstrom Upsets Bivens for Dem Party Chair; Pullen Beats Back James Challenge for GOP Spot," unhappy with the continuing erosion of the Dem brand in AZ, Eckerstrom and the Progressives tried to upset the "Kingdom of Maricopa" strategy of the central Democratic leadership. (Dem higher-ups and the ranks and file are quick to note that 60% of all the votes cast in this election were cast in Maricopa County. That includes Tucson, that includes Flagstaff and all the hinterlands rolled together.)
Progressives, however, counter that the only way to retrain this reddest of red states is to get the progressive message out in every election and force a frame on the debate that is away from issues like abortions and gay marriage and whether Obama is a secret Muslim Nazi-Socialist Kenyan, and so on. Fresh out of the gate with Obama's taking office Arizona Progressives unified and surged in the vote, derailing Bivens and briefly seating Eckerstrom who vowed to take a "15 County" approach for the state party that was similar to Howard Dean's widely-lauded "50 State" approach of working in all races, even long shots to spread the progressive message.
But less than a month after the upset, in a mirror of the national collapse of progressive momentum following the Obama election, Lemons was again reporting on the Brew-ha-ha. This time that Eckerstrom had resigned acknowledging, that, uh-oh, he wasn't as ready to meet the time and travel demands of actually being state party chair as he thought. Needless to say, (but i'm doing it anyway), not only had progressives upbraided themselves, apparently, there had also been considerable dissent all along among the old school rank and file Dems at the thought of having progressives shaping the party agenda, and even talk of fundraising drying up if Bivens was not back on top as the led money man for the Dems.
Guess what? Presto-change-o, Eckerstrom's back out, Bivens is back in and Democrats are selling, or so he says. But, the Dems have been battling an image of being sell-outs every since, with the upstart progressives still scrambling to reform their coup.
Still, the saga of the progressives' lunge to regain their credibility was written behind the lines of oratory and there was plenty of that to be had around that floor. So it made for a thrilling hour. But the meeting only had so much time and soon we were back to the main hall for the afternoon general assembly and a final round of "we'll get 'em next time"-type speeches from the various, and numerous, defeated statewide candidates.
Though some genuine winners were in the mix, the roster of speakers shared the same tone of "trying to not speak of the grapes as too, too, sour." Re-elected Southern AZ Congresswoman Gabbie Giffords stood proud when her turn at bat came round. "We didn't do anything wrong," she bragged as she spoke of her role in the Democrat-led Congress' widely lauded immensely productive legislative record. Yet every achievement she listed was in fact, in the end, a sold-out, compromised-to-the-point-of-meaningless, backroom deal designed to satisfy a sneering GOP who hate giving even an inch to win a mile; and to serve Dems who would rather manufacture PR points, rather than actually accomplish anything.
On a lighter note, for those keeping track, again Rodney Glassman made it clear he was still hoping to run for something, and Andrei Cherny reminded the rest of us why we should hope he would run again as well. The tearjerker sweetheart prize of the afternoon had to go to Felecia Rotellini, whose speech left not one dry eye in the house, including her own. She had been the closest statewide candidate in the election, getting 48% of the vote. Like Cherny, Felecia felt like a future of AZ Democrats. Afterwards, she also called my lovely wife Beth, "An Unsung Hero." So, of course, even if she hadn't already seemed like the most competent Dem candidate among what i took to be a highly qualified slate, Rotellini certainly won my heart with that remark.
Still, my favorite speaker that day, on a day of maybe great hope but many mixed messages, was the big man himself, Terry Goddard, who rose to thunderous applause and mixed standing ovations. Though the outgoing Attorney General, Goddard's not going anywhere as a force in AZ Dem politics anytime soon. Like the other Dem elite, Goddard was happy with the level of productivity of the mechanism the state party machine created, proud of the work Dems had done together.
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