Monday, January 22nd, 2007...7:15 am
Some Comments on Saturday
I expected that David Waid would win. Before the meeting, I would have said that a decisive win would have been 65% or so. Waid won with a ridiculous 86% of the vote. I don’t know if this means that there wasn’t as much enthusiasm from the new progressive wing about Randy Camacho as had been reported, or if maybe his odd speech lost him support, who knows?
Jeff Latas ran for Senior Vice Chair. He lost, but got many more votes for that slot than Camacho did for chair. I don’t know if this was due to Pima County supporting one of our own (although Ken Smith, a former Pima County activist who moved to Pinetop was also running), or if, like I said before, the enthusiasm for Camacho wasn’t there among the new progressives.
Camacho’s speech was very strange. He had an awful lot of fluffy rhetoric (including quoting Alfred Tennyson or was it Jane Tennyson?), but not one word about his program. I suppose it could be argued that his “30/15/8″ plan was available on his website and was detailed in the mailing he sent, but this was a chance to close the deal and he didn’t take it. Waid, on the other hand, gave a dry recitation of what the party has done over the last year or so.
Whatever the reasons for Camacho’s low vote total, I think that it indicates that the new progressive wing of the party needs to do more work to reach out to the rest of us. There was a lot of dissatisfaction with Waid, but Camacho’s folks didn’t spend an awful lot of time working outside of the various DFA and progressive organizations to push these people to their side.
Donna Branch-Gilby was elected First Vice Chair, which once again gives Pima County a voice on the DNC which we haven’t had since Martin Bacal was defeated in 2004.
Former Baja Arizonan Ken Smith was elected as Senior Vice chair. Smith was part of a reform group on the Amphi School board that helped clean up the cronyism that had been going on there, and his wife was part of the Tortolita town council during that rump town’s entire legal existence. We need those two trouble makers back.
In other races, Latas and Camacho both were elected to the copious 2nd Vice Chair offices. Other interesting names were Tony Gonzales, a young activist from Flagstaff and Jo Kelleher. Interestingly, there is also a Jo Kelleher in Ireland who is a nurse and elected official. Ireland’s Kelleher is a member of the Fine Gael party and ran her last race for Passage West/Monkston Town Council on an anti-incineration platform.
I left early (Tucson was playing Phoenix in Roller Derby, I have my priorities), but Pima County’s anti-war resolution hit the floor after I left. National Committeewoman Janice Brunson spoke against it. She said that people would think that Democrats were crazy if it passed. Someone pointed out that surveys show that nearly 70% of the people want an end to the war.
“Are 70% of the American people crazy?”
“Yes,” Brunson responded.
For all of the problems I have with Brunson, she has been able to really keep in close touch with a pretty sizeable group of Democratic activists. With that though, she lost the room. Lucky for her, her office wasn’t up on Saturday.
1 Comment
January 22nd, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Hey, it was nice to have Ken and Barb move up here. And the best thing about Ken is that he knows he represents the whole state and he is willing to go anywhere to help Democrats move forward.
To be honest (and I came to the meeting with an open mind on the Waid/Camacho race), and you are right that his speech was full of platitudes and short (make that absent) on specifics, but the one line in Camacho’s speech that really lost me was when he talked about how we should dare to push back against the tide. To be honest, that made me wonder whether he thought it was 1995 or 2007. Right now I like the way the tide is going, and it’s the Republicans who want to push it back.
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