Politics and Dharma

Ugh! These dogs are tired. And my feet hurt, too.

Caucusing is a long and painful process in the best of worlds. What we’re seeing in the Democratic State Convention this weekend is the party for the first time actually having to function on the scale at which it was intended. For several decades, the party had drawn up rules intended to allot proportional representation to the entire state but has never been held responsible to that number: relatively few people usually ever attend the state convention. This weekend, the state’s full compliment of delegates and alternates are present for the biggest political event in this party’s history.

The main hall is even more stunningly huge when it is full of people. The hall is acoustically dead, which is a great thing when there’s ten thousand people in it, but also means that they had to pump in the audio with many, many speakers distributed over the space. The room is so huge that from the back, the speakers on the stage looked about an inch tall. They had to put four jumbo-trons in the room in order for everyone to see the action. There were very, very few empty chairs. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Traditionally, there has always been a strong black presence at the state convention, and blacks are present as friends, neighbors, voters, and elected officials. Democrats try hard to be an inclusive party, and I believe that the substantive participation of blacks and Hispanics is proof that the inclusion is sincere. That being said, I have not ever seen black people so well represented at the Texas State Democratic Convention. Nor have I witnessed so many with such joy and excitement in their eyes. Fact is that nearly all Democrats are giddy with anticipation these days, with the impending grasp of the executive and legislative houses seemingly nearly inevitable. The party of CEO businessmen couldn’t have done a better job of running the country into the ground, so a major Democratic victory in November appears to be fait accompli.

One disappointment has been a direct result of the enormous draw this event has occasioned. The convention floor had to be limited to delegates and alternates only, with guest tickets strictly rationed and raffled and good only for an overflow room with a jumbotron and audio feed. The stated reason for this policy was to keep the fire marshal from getting wiggy, but the result was that friends and families who came along to witness history had to be split up or turned away. What was worse was seeing the vast pools of empty chairs in the overflow room that could have easily been opened to the general public without any loss of capacity. It’s not my obligation to run it, though, so I can’t really second guess the decisions the party staff made.

To that end, the general flow of the convention has been pretty good. Most folks got credentialed within an hour of arriving, with late arrivals getting through in ten minutes or less. Issues causes appeared to be well attended, but the senate district caucuses in the afternoon ended up running over handling delegate assignments, so not every caucus was able to complete before the rooms needed to be cleared for the general assembly. As was expressed more than once by folks other than myself: the party could still have done a better job of communicating the anticipated flow of the process to everyone.