Unity, Part 1

Last Friday and Saturday I attended the West Virginia Democratic Convention in Charleston. I arrived Friday morning from Huntington, about fifty miles west of Charleston. The theme of the convention was "Unity." I imagine this meant we were all to come together to anoint Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Presidential candidate in 2016. That didn't happen.

I hate to be a "Tuve,"Spanish for "I had." We used to speak, unsympathetically, in the Social Security office in Miami where I worked for many years, about people from Cuba who would start all their sentences with "Tuve" and tell us what they left behind in Cuba.

I attended the California State Convention in 2011 in Sacramento and 2012 in San Diego. There were scheduled lunches and dinners and guest speakers including Bernie Sanders in Sacramento, and Al Franken in San Diego, as well as the superstars of California politics, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer put in appearances; Feinstein spoke at a dinner, open to the conventioneers, for an extra charge. The San Diego convention was at the Hilton. Many of us chose to stay elsewhere to save money, but the facilities were immaculate.

"Tuve" a much better time in California. Our convention here was at the dingy Charleston Convention Center, where there is construction going on and the thermostat was set at 50. There was a snack bar open Friday with $3.00 pretzels, small bottles of water and antique pizza. I never saw our Governor, and our one Democratic senator had a private lunch for the State Executive Committee honoring the chairperson, who, not coincidentally, was running for reelection. More on that later. I stayed just out of town in a place called "Mink Shoals" at a motel from the chain where I get points. There was only a three dollar per day charge to park in the Convention Center garage.

Thankfully, there were less jaded young people there, including a large contingent of Bernie Sanders supporters from Morgantown. Bernie beat Hillary by fifteen points in West Virginia, and won in each of our state's fifty-five counties. In the Rolling Stone issue marked June 16, Bernie Sanders was interviewed just after the West Virginia primary. He wondered why six of the eight superdelegates from West Virginia were pledged to Hillary. Good question.

Everything ran late at the convention. The real convention was to start at five Friday, but registration started at three. I arrived at 10 from Huntington, and met Selena Vickers, the technical wonk for the Bernie campaign, sitting next to a cardboard cutout of Bernie Sanders. I spoke with her briefly about possibly adding an amendment to overturn the decision to allow concealed carry of weapons without a permit. I looked up a similar law in California, which made me realize that it probably wouldn't get passed, this being West Virginia.

I found where the Reform synagogue is in Charleston. I called and got no answer, so I went there. It's a brick-and-glass modern building in a neighborhood of grand houses facing the Kanawha River. Probably the best neighborhood in town sixty years ago. The back door by the parking was open, so I walked in and met the secretary. He was unhappy that I was able to walk in and said he was not authorized to give me a tour without an appointment. I was okay with all that. I just explained who I was and why I was in town.

Back at the convention, I ran into Jamie Blake, a youngish (out of college) guy, one of the Morgantown Bernie organizers, and we went out for lunch at the mall for wraps in the food court. At least Charleston has a mall downtown.

We hung around until three, when we could register for the convention. There were committee meetings until five, when the convention started.No lunches or dinners were planned for the conference. I drove to my motel, checked in, and slept for an hour.

The convention started well after five. The rules committee had met before, and rules had been changed to make it easier to amend the platform and allow more time for debate. There were speeches from Doug Reynolds, the Democratic candidate for Attorney General, from Belinda Biafore, the state chair, and from Natalie Tennant, our secretary of state, whis running again. She lost two years ago for Senate, because she didn't take a stand on any issues. Reynolds is probably an improvement over Patrick Morissey, our paid-for-by-corporate-lobbyist Republican attorney general. Still, Reynolds voted for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (also known as the Freedom To Discriminate bill) and introduced a bill that would mandate that colleges allow guns on campus. I confronted some Reynolds kids who had a table for him. They sputtered something about "just doing what his constituents wanted." Not good enough. I may have to vote for him, but I will never campaign for him.

I don't remember anything much else about Friday night- except that I hadn't had dinner. I bought a stale $3.00 pretzel in the lobby and went to my car and brought in some bottles of water, so no one should have to pay $3.00. Many people still don't drink the water in Charleston, after the chemical poisoning more than two years ago. Things broke up at 9:30. The kids asked me if I wanted to go out drinking with them, forgetting that I am sixty-six, not twenty-six. I stopped at a convenience store and bought snacks, which I brought back to my hotel and ate while looking at Friday's Charleston newspaper. I was asleep by eleven.

I had breakfast at the hotel, and got back to the Convention Center by nine. There were plenty of plots a-hatching. Many people had petitions out, about banning guns, legalizing marijuana, requiring superdelegates to vote for the winning candidate from the primary. I signed all of them, except the two that were meant to embarrass Hillary Clinton. It was too late for that. I noted that the vast majority of delegates were white, Christian and straight. In California, most of the Democrats were Mexican-American, African-American and Asian-American, Native, or Jewish. And a whole lot of them were gay. In talking to people, I found that there were more Jews than I originally thought, living in rural counties after escaping New York and their Jewish heritage. Someone pointed out that there were many more gay people than I imagined. Maybe so.

Jim Justice, the Democratic nominee for Governor, spoke once things got started. He was a Republican until last year, is a coal mine owner and the wealthiest man in West Virginia. He owns the Greenbrier resort in southeastern West Virginia, and avoided debates and policy statements during his primary campaign against two other contenders. He is notorious for not paying bills on time. Progressives in the state find him appalling. Our Bernie people, led by Morgantown's Shane Assadzandi, a young dynamo, planned a walkout during Justice's speech. I stayed in for the first ten minutes, while Justice talked on in an almost unintelligible rural West Virginia drawl about his foot surgery, how much money the Greenbriar brings into the state, and how he bought  a shovel and pail, which he had with him, from a woman by the side of the road, who was trying to raise money to buy food. I couldn't take any more and left. His speech seemed to go on quite a long time. He never mentioned any ideas for how to run the state, as far as I know.

John Perdue, the state treasurer spoke as well. My hearing is not great and the sound system wasn't clear either but it seems the Republican legislature was right to require English for state business. His drawl was so thick, I could understand almost nothing, and he went on for probably a half hour.

The superstar of the convention, our Kamala Harris, if you will, was Mary Ann Claytor, an African-American woman who came from nowhere to win the Democratic nomination for Auditor. I didn't vote for her, because another candidate had endorsements from people I liked, and because Claytor's website said she had a degree in religion from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. That set off warning bells for me. She spoke with the cadences of Martin Luther King, Jr., preaching to us about her experience in the auditor's office, of her background, and how important it is to include everyone in the state. She was the first to mention the LGBT community, and how we needed to be included. She had the passion and fire that everyone else who had spoken lacked. People rose to their feet and cheered. And I understood every word she said.

When we finally got to amendments from the floor, it was noon, and there was no lunch break. Shane and his crew and a few others introduced bills to ban assault weapons, to ban fracking and mountaintop removal mining, to stop fighting the EPA on air and water quality regulations, have a gay rights bill. All of these passed on a voice vote. And why? Because the mostly older Hillary Clinton fans  joined together with the mostly younger Bernie Sanders fans to make West Virginia a more progressive place. The anti-Clinton petitions were never presented, and this helped us find the "Unity" we were looking for.

Until now, the Democratic Party in West Virginia's only claim to liberalism has been its support of unions. The people in charge of the party not only don't like Bernie Sanders,they don't think much of Hillary Clinton either. This convention brought together the Hillary and Bernie people in a new way.

Meanwhile, a graduating WVU student named Franklin, whip-smart and handsome, asked me for a ride home. I wanted to be back and eat before Tree of Life's Shavuot service at 7:30. In West Virginia, Jewish holidays are never figured into anyone's schedule. Franklin and I left at two and went to the mall for lunch, as nothing had been provided. I was freezing in that barn of a room, and about to go off on someone for lack of food. We got back to the car at three, and were about to drive away, when Danielle, the brilliant and most glamorous of the Bernie people in Morgantown, called my phone and begged us to come back. Franklin and I discussed it briefly and went back. Someone called for a quorum, and there was none. The seventy people on the central committee were gone to Senator Manchin's luncheon before a vote on the next chair. People came back who had drifted off for food, and the central committee said we could count them even if they weren't there.We finally passed the whole platform with all the progressive amendments intact. At four, we headed back to Morgantown.

Chris Regan, the vice chair of the central committee, a Bernie supporter, a smart guy and a great writer, who is appalled by most of what goes on in this state, and writes a blog about it (homeyesterday.com) was later defeated for chair of the central committee by incumbent Belinda Biafore, who presided over the loss of the Legislature to the Republicans, because the Democrats refused to stand for anything. Don't get me started.