Karen Bernal, a former labor organizer from Sacramento, was elected chair of the Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party at the state convention held in late April. She spoke with the Community Alliance about her plans for the Progressive Caucus and progressive politics within the Democratic Party.
Q: What is your overall strategy for your tenure as chair?
A: My strategy is through infrastructure changes to be able bring certain numbers to any kind of issue that we feel is very important, be it something of an internal nature, say within the party, or an issue we care about public policy wise.
The caucus is now four years old. We came into this thing because we were up against the Bush administration, and we felt we were saddled with leadership that wasn’t really bringing the fight to them in the way we wanted. And we gave voice to that. So I guess you could say that what we were engaged in was really fighting fires at that very moment, which is a very different thing than now. It’s kind of like a dog running after a car. What if one day the dog gets the car? Now what do you do with it?
So we kind of feel like that now that Obama has come. We have a very different kind of task. We need to switch from fighting an administration and a power presence that we are against to policy accountability and trying to actually realize a democracy, if you will, within the Democratic Party. I know that sounds ridiculous, but we the grassroots across the country and particularly in California has really had to fight to assert itself and make its presence felt. What you’re seeing now with the election of Hilary Crosby as controller [of the California Democratic Party] and with a number of other things is that the grassroots is coming into being in a real major way, in a political way.
We hope that in the next two years what we can do is to really have an effect on the way that the infrastructure changes, resulting in an on-the-ground presence of a real grassroots power base.
Q: As chair, how will you implement that?
A: We’re really a progressive caucus itself. There is no daylight for the most part. People join the caucus for various reasons. Actually, we have a few people who truly are not progressive; they’re with the party, and they’re there to kind of watch what’s going on and maybe even to affect a trend or to mitigate it. We understand that, but by and large a lot of people are here because we all believe in the same things. When you really look at it, there’s no daylight between anyone in terms of what they feel about most of the issues that as progressives we care about.
What happens, though, is what to do about it. One of the hard lessons that we’ve realized is that we’ve got to move beyond passion and rhetoric and just talking to one another. I mean, it’s not enough anymore to say, “Hey, did you go see that great speech that so and so gave? Have you read this paper? Did you read that article? I’d like to speak.” That’s not enough anymore. We’ve got to go to build an organization that’s going to make sure those things are manifested. So we must address how we go about doing that.
One of the things is that I would like to make this a truly statewide caucus in the sense that I would like to have representatives around the state be counted among the leadership in the caucus. I’m talking about real bottom-up democracy. We will always respond to those people that stand out. We know that when you see a huge flame, you see a real movement. It’s usually made up of a lot of people, but also there are those sparks that just kind of ignite a little more. We understand that, and that will never go away. There will be certain individuals that stand out that way.
But by and large, what happens is that up to now we’ve had people that usually come from the Bay Area, from LA, and that always seems to be the case for the leadership. What I am seeing—maybe it’s someone that comes from Sacramento, that lives in Sacramento, I’m not really from Sacramento—is that I know for a fact that there is a vast progressive wave out there, and they’re not necessarily in those places. There are cultural differences that make it so that if we want to get those critical numbers that we’re talking about, we need to be able to have those people be in key positions to grow the base.
We’re not going to have people from LA, for instance, come up and talk to people in Fresno and to tell them what the score is and what progressivism is and how we can build a movement. Because guess what? The people in Fresno already know what progressivism is. They have their own history about it, and they can tell the people from LA how they should go about it [in Fresno] and what kind of help that they need.
What I’m suggesting here is that we need to all work together. And I’m suggesting that what we need to think about is maybe putting together a structure that has representatives from various areas of the state. How do we go about building a movement that really is going to put pressure on the state party and maybe nationally to say that we want the Afghanistan war to be ended? That we don’t agree with the military commission. And so on. We have to build. We have to have an ongoing ground operation anywhere that we are in California—all 58 counties. And we are not going to do that by only having a small number of people up at the top that hail from places like the Bay Area and LA. We actually have to have people on the ground that are accountable and that we can look to and say, “What’s going on there? What are the numbers? How many people are there? What do we need to do to get those numbers up?”
So I plan to actually to go about that with the approval and hopefully the help of others. I believe that I won my campaign because of that idea. I intend to do that. I won by over 80%, and I believe in large part I did so because of the idea that people are tired of being passionate, having great speeches and then losing every time. At the end, you know, we’re done with the talk. We want action now.
Q: You mentioned a couple of issues. Is there a short list of specific concerns that you want to make sure are addressed?
A: In terms of public policy, you have the short term, what are the most immediate priorities right now. Well, the budget and the big fight over all the initiatives. There are people that are concerned with state issues like that, and then there are people that are concerned with national issues. I’d say in the Progressive Caucus, we have concerns with all the typical stuff, like single-payer healthcare—that’s a huge overriding issue that we will be continually pushing on—foreign policy, the wars and Mideast policy in general, the economic situation in California, the death penalty and workers’ rights. And a lot of the things that are typically associated with what I would say is progressive/left politics.
The short list though would probably be the economy, single-payer healthcare, foreign policy and the death penalty as a state issue.
Q: In terms of the Central Valley and Fresno, in particular, obviously a key issue here is water, and really that’s an important issue throughout the state. Other areas of concern are the environment and where we’re going with rapid transit and high-speed rail. Do you foresee the caucus looking at any of those issues?
A: Not immediately, although I would tell you that personally I think that they’re important issues. I want to get back to that.
Immediately, I think what will end up happening is that we are going to be concerned with how to build an effective organization. Unfortunately, it’s not as sexy as delving right into issues. But we have to do this because if we don’t concern ourselves with the building of this organization so that it can become an effective entity, we will find ourselves in the same situation we have found ourselves in the last few years. That is to say there’s a few dedicated, passionate individuals who lead the organization and the occasional mob that follows them. And we lose every single time. So we really, in a sense, have to grow up and focus on that for probably the next few months.
In between all that, however, I think any of the issues that the activists care about enough to make the rest of notice will be addressed and would be responded to. So, if for instance, there was a huge noise coming from the Central Valley about those issues, it would be taken up. The one thing I have liked about the Progressive Caucus, no matter what’s happened, good times and in weaker times, has always been that we have responded to issues that people care about. So I would say to you that if there was some noise being made and people wanted to bring it to the caucus, we would definitely look into and pick it up.
As far as the focus goes for the next couple of three months or so, I would definitely tell you that it’s going to be on infrastructure building. That’s not to say that we’re not going to talk about the issues. We’ve got an Executive Board meeting coming up in July. At all of the Executive Board meetings, just like the [California Democratic Party] convention, all the caucuses meet just normally anyway. That’s a matter of course. So we will have a Progressive Caucus meeting in July, the weekend of the 17th through the 19th in Burlingame, right outside San Francisco. We meet in various spots of California every three or four months. So that’s the next one coming up, and there will be some hot topics talked about there. For instance, whatever legislation is on the table at the State House that certain activists care about, be it sustainable agriculture to what’s related to the single-payer healthcare bill all the way to the water issues, the high-speed rail. So if we have some dedicated, passionate activists in the Central Valley that care about that, I would say that they need to bring that to the caucus leadership. It will be taken up, and we can talk about it in July.
While that is all going on, we will be really focused on our infrastructure building. One of the things that we’re going to do is that we will be trying to meet either in Fresno or in San Luis Obispo in June. We just want to invite people to talk about the things that they care about, the direction that they’d like to see the caucus going and, oh by the way, what do you think about some of these procedures and policies that we would like to see adopted by the caucus to make this a more effective organization. And one of those things is being representative.
One of the things that I intend to is to have constant engagement with the membership in between the conference meetings, and that first one’s coming up in June. When we do things like that, that means that going into the next E-Board meeting we’ll definitely be much more on the same page. We’ll be engaged. We’ll be going into the caucus meeting having talked ahead of time, having spoken to one another ahead of time and it won’t be as those we are going into these caucus meetings cold—kind of wondering what are we going to do next from the last caucus meeting or convention. That’s what’s happened in the past, and I want to put an end to that.
I think one of the things is if we’re going to be very effective getting to those issues, we need to know that we have an organization on the ground that we can bring numbers to and that will respond to any issue that we bring up.
[Concerning water,] there’s a type of war going on between the environmentalists, the fishermen, the people and the industry, and the mega-agricultural powers that be and the concerns of the farmers that make a living off of that. I think that discussion, we need to have a lot more. It’s been a long time coming and it hasn’t been at the forefront, but I really think it’s one of those conversations that we probably won’t be able to be put off for much longer. I think it’s really only up to those activists to demand that the conversation be had and heard by everyone. Right now, they’ve been talking among themselves, but it’s time for them to say, “Hey, we want to have a forum about this. We want to talk about this. And then we want a conversation in the caucus, and we want to know where everyone stands.” I’m not really sure where everyone stands, but I would have thought that most people probably stand on what they vaguely understand as sustainable agriculture or whatever that may mean to them. We’d like to be able to hear different points of view.
When it comes to the high-speed rail, we, my family, just got back from Europe, and that’s how we traveled—a lot by train and high-speed rail. I definitely am for it.
Q: The organization seems to be primarily structured around issues, or at least it has been in the past. But what role do you see in benefiting Democratic candidates particularly for those going against incumbents in red areas?
A: I think you’re right that the organization seems to have been focused on issues. And that’s never going to go away. But there is an aspect now that we’re going to begin to see, a definite perceptible change. And it’s not only because of the Progressive Caucus but also about who has been elected to leadership. It’s also because generally the grassroots, the progressive grassroots, has reached a level of ascendancy now that is, how should I say it, more powerful. That part has yet to be determined.
It’s going to change. We may not notice it right off the bat, but I think anyone that’s paying attention will notice it because the fact that Hilary Crosby won as controller was completely due to the fact that the party’s delegates recognized that the grassroots activists had been neglected, the 58-county plan had been neglected. What you’re beginning to see is a wrong that is being righted. And the activists not only want that to be changed, addressed and dealt with, but they demanded it by electing people that spoke to that and care about that and actually have been working on that.
I am one of the original authors of the 58-county plan, and I believe that model is something the Progressive Caucus needs. It can be important to the Progressive Caucus, and I’d like to apply it there as well.
In the first place, now that we have Hilary there, there’s going to be a greater degree of transparency about how the money is being spent and allocated among the counties. Fresno has been one of those places that has been not only ignored but ignored to the point where it’s just simply not reasonable. There’s no good reason for why Fresno has had to go through what it has had to through as large as it is. And that, I think, is going to end.
I think it’s an issue No. 1 of money and also of being paid attention to and listened to and responded to in a way that the local party wants to be responded to. They’re not going to have people go in there and say, “We’re here to help you, but we’re here to help you the way we want to help you.” I think that we’ve got a window of opportunity right now with the people that have been elected and the progressives that have been elected to follow up on those victories and say, “OK, this is what we want and this is how we want it.”
And the Progressive Caucus is by and large made up of those activists, and I think that anything that those activists want from those areas we will respond to that. We have our own case studies and issues. Here in Sacramento, I’m surrounded by a lot of assemblies and congressional districts, for instance, where we’ve got a lot of races in play. So I understand exactly what you’re saying. And the progressives are already gearing up for being very involved. And what I mean by that is determining the kind of candidates that they would like to see in those positions. So I think that what has to happen is that we as the Progressive Caucus have to give attention to that, and we have to be able to encourage the party and demand that the party pay attention to what the grassroots is trying to do and what they would like to see happen.
Now, do we expect that we’re going to run into some push-pull with the traditional powers that be who tell us “No, that’s not possible?” I would imagine so. But we can’t have that. It’s just one of those things that we’re going to have to push on. The Progressive Caucus will be paying attention to what the progressives on the ground have to say about candidates and not just go by what the party leadership is telling us.
Q: One concern I have heard raised here is the structural roadblocks to involvement within the party. You have the central committees, the clubs, the AD delegates and the caucuses. And what we saw, particularly in the last election cycle, was a lot of people who viewed coming into the party as problematic. So even though they may agree with us as progressives they’re registering Decline to State, and they’re trying to get involved in ways without working through what in many cases they view as a labyrinth-like Democratic Party structure. What, if anything, can be done to address that?
A: A simple observation I could make is that for those people who are not interested in party politics in general, no matter how ideal it could be, I would say that what they’re doing, which is to work outside the party and to be part of a social movement, is still a good thing and very necessary for those of us inside the party. We can’t only have a movement inside; there has to be an outside as well. And the people on the inside, the party itself, have to then be seen as responsive to the people on the outside, on the street, if you will. That inside/outside is something that needs to continue. I view anyone that wants to continue that progressive social movement building on the outside as an ally, an absolute ally.
Turning toward the party, I’m one of those people that feels that the Democratic Party—I know this is going to sound like an outrageous thing for me to say—but I don’t necessarily feel at times that they’re a re-formable party in some ways. I think that because we’re operating within the concept of an oligarchy in our society. Because of that, there are forces that have nothing to do with being a Democrat or a Republican that are playing out, and members of both parties respond to those. So I think that it’s going to be those that think the Democratic Party can be “reformed.” I think others think of it in terms of how we can better effect the demands that we may have on the inside. Part of that, to a small degree, may be certain rules, certain procedures and demands that are making things more democratic. But I think a lot of us that have been at this for a while kind of understand that we’re not going to get everything that we want, but we will get some things that we want because at the end of the day if we don’t, they’re not going to have a base.
So on the inside you mentioned that many of the things are a labyrinth. Those things, believe it or not, are the topic of conversation. I was just in a meeting yesterday where it came up, and we’re talking about some reforms that can be made to the way that members of committees are chosen. How do we go about choosing people that make up standing committees? Before, for instance, they were all completely appointments by the chair. Do we want to be able to push for something that would say that part of that needs to be elected? That kind of thing. This is called the Democratic Party, now let’s make it democratic. That’s part of the fight that we’re talking about.
A lot of people have said to me “Why do you do this” and I jokingly answer them and say sometimes I ask myself the same question. But I’ve come to accept the fact that I’m not going to find a party that’s perfect and join it, because it doesn’t exist. Instead, you have to find a party through which you feel that you can effect some changes and to try to make it better. I think that’s the best answer I can give you on that.
So we understand that some things, the rules and policies or procedures, are byzantine, convoluted and designed to stymie easy bottom-up democracy, but we understand that immediately, and those are some of the things that we are trying to change. So it’s not like you can join the party, and those are the rules that you have to accept and that’s the end of it. No! We’re fighting that.
Q: I didn’t get the sense that the meeting time for the caucuses was used particularly effectively at the convention. Even for the Progressive Caucus, it seemed that the election took an extraordinarily long part of the time that was allotted to the meeting. So is there any way that you think those meetings can be made more effective? The convention is really your best shot to bring in new people and impress them with what you’re trying to do.
A: I would agree with you. Backing up, this particular [Progressive Caucus] election for anyone that had been following it had a serious degree of controversy and contentiousness about it. We knew that going into it. And I would say that because of it we understood that it was going to not only dominate in the sense of focus but also eat up the time. We had the issue of the vote ahead of the election, wherein it was going to be decided whether or not we would have one or two chairs, one or two vice chairs, and so on. And that came off a controversial vote that had taken place in November, not so much the vote itself but in the noticing of the vote. So we had a whole—I can’t use the street term here—that we knew we would have to deal with. I would like to think that was a kind of a one-off.
Generally, there’s an hour and a half given to most of the caucus meetings, period. We know that’s just not adequate. C’mon, you know. We know that’s not adequate because you’re not going to go three months and have an hour and a half meeting and cover everything you need to cover. And it just goes to show you that from the party’s point of view, the fact that you only allot that kind of time indicates that there’s nothing really profound that’s going to occur. We require more.
So what can be done? Well, I’m not so sure how you would handle however many people there were at that [Progressive Caucus] meeting. There was about 600 votes or so cast. How you would handle that in an hour and a half and have the speeches and have a by-laws change? But the fact is that if something is as important as the by-laws change, you need to have a healthy number of people there that can register how they feel about an important rules change. So you can’t get around that. There’s a lot of positions up for election, and that’s going to eat up time. But to answer your question, what you’re really driving at, I do understand what you’re saying, and that’s also one of the reasons that I believe it is very important to have these meetings between the official party-designated caucus meetings that you would find at the conventions and E-Board meetings. I believe it’s very important.
One of the things that we would like to set up is a By-Laws Committee, for example, so that if there are changes that need to be made they are at the recommendation of a By-Laws Committee. There’s a recommendation of the By-Laws Committee, which having done so would probably carry a certain number of votes, so that it lessens the amount of time that there would be for debate about something. Part of it is just knowing the procedures game and how to go about doing something streamlined—a process so that it takes up less time at a meeting. You can do this very democratically too. It’s not as though you are trying to preempt something. If you announce ahead of time that we would like to have input on something and we’d like you to weigh in on this, by the time we get to a caucus meeting we’re not spending 45 minutes on the shade of blue that something is. You can do this. That’s what I mean about how we go about changing the infrastructure. It just simply hasn’t been done. It’s time that we do things like that so we can vote on designated party business at caucus meetings and move onto things we would like to actually talk about—public policy, issues that we care about.
In terms of the convention, I heard a couple of people saying that the time we spent on the by-laws was too long and the election shouldn’t have taken that long. We wanted to talk about the issues that we care about. I agree, but the election is a very important thing. I’m not really sure how you make that go faster. I think that the by-laws thing could have been made to go a lot faster, but there wasn’t an infrastructure in place to facilitate the streamlining of it. I hope that at these meetings we have in between, where we have a by-laws committee, and that’s one of the things that we are definitely starting, we can streamline the process so we aren’t taking up 45 minutes over whether or not we would like to have a secretary-treasurer or a secretary and a treasurer.
Q: What struck me about the convention was that it’s long on ceremony and short on substance, the convention itself. And I think a lot of new people, in particular, found that not to their liking or particularly productive. For example, one of the thoughts I had was that they could use some of that time to have the caucuses report to the body about what they’re doing.
A: That wasn’t going to happen. I’m glad you brought that up because that’s something I wouldn’t have thought about as I’ve gotten so used to the puffery, if you will, that it’s kind of one of the things I detach from my brain because I just push for the things that I care about. It’s unfortunate that you would have had to come in at this moment because this convention, in particular, was not like other conventions. This convention came with changes in party leadership and caucus leadership, which happens every four years for the party and every two years for the caucuses. So you would have had a certain amount of that every four years. But you had a ton of it this time because we were seeing the passing of an era with Art Torres stepping down [as CDP chair] after 12 years. So what you saw was a lot of pomp and circumstance of ceremony attached to all the events and the proceedings that would not have been there at a normal convention. For instance, if you go next year it’s not going to be like that. You won’t see tribute dinners; you won’t see any of the remembrances and any of that kind of stuff going on. You came into a very unusual convention.
But I agree with you it would have been nice to have reports from the caucuses. I think that’s a very useful thing to do.
One of the things that has been a huge criticism, and I think a very well-founded criticism, by many of the progressives and probably other caucuses as well is that we’ve seen a lot of these caucuses formed and they’re formed to speak to certain interests. But insofar as the party is concerned, a lot of these caucuses have been very effective centers of influence and reliable folks along certain lines.
What we are trying to say as progressives is that we think these caucuses ought to actually be concerned with the issues that make them a caucus. And that those things ought to be transmitted back up the food chain. Rather than just being loyal Democratic Party members, we would like to see an increased level of activism. I think that’s the biggest difference between the Progressive Caucus and a lot of the other caucuses, although not all of them. I don’t want to say that we’re the only caucus that believes in a heightened level of activism. I would say that’s not true with some of the caucuses. But I would say above all the other caucuses we probably embrace the credo of activism more than others. We would like to see that kind of activist quality at an increased level for everyone. We would like that to be responded to. And we would like that to get some airtime.
Would I like to see a report by all the caucuses on the general assembly stage? Yeah, absolutely.
Q: A number of the caucuses seemed to have a setup where they had vice chairs based on a North-South structure.
A: It used to be chairs in the Progressive Caucus and a single vice chair. Just so you know before you continue with your question, I was one of those people that voted and lost on that vote for the co-chairs—the co-chairs with the North-South arrangement. Obviously, we didn’t win on that.
Q: A couple of things bother me about that. By and large, I think people see North-South as San Francisco and Los Angeles. So for those of us not living in those areas, that’s an issue. For example, if somebody from Fresno wants to run for one of those positions, which one would they even run for?
A: I thought of that very fact on the road when I was campaigning. My idea for a representative form of governing in terms of this caucus has been enthusiastically received. We have to understand that this is a conversation that we’ve got to think very differently about instead of just this North-South thing. People in Fresno, for instance, have very different ideas about how they see this broken out. Maybe we’re talking about a Central-North-South approach.
The idea is changing the structure from the bottom up. That is one of the things that we’re going to be focused on at these in-between meetings. One of them is the outright structure of the leadership. I said to my fellow officers that I was really surprised that we lost on the North-South chair vote the way that we did. I asked, “Do you think that we should maybe try to revisit this in the future because I’m not really sure that people understood what they were voting for at that point.” But the response was “No, let it go. Besides, we are going to be looking into a change of the structure anyway.” So this is one of those things that is going to be addressed directly.
I’m very, very curious to hear what everyone has to say, and I want there to be a healthy presence of central Californians at the in-between meetings. That will be the opportunity if they want to have a voice registered in this regard. It’s very important that they show up. If they don’t show up, I can’t speak for others. They need to speak for themselves.
I think the idea of what you’re saying is right. This is hugely unfair to people that don’t think of themselves as either North or South and to a lesser degree what do they front as. I really think that we need to think differently, and part of the whole idea of the representative form of governing is going to help along those lines. We will be able to develop bases for many of these activists that rise to the top and it is representative.
To a lesser degree, we have those starting to talk about the same issue with San Diego. When you say the South, up to now San Diego has not been in the picture, believe it or not, at all. And this is really a shame. I know as a peace and justice advocate, as an antiwar advocate, San Diego has some of the best activists in California, and they have not been there [in the party leadership]. That’s got to stop. By and large, it’s been LA. Why? Because they have a huge base in terms of numbers and it kind of almost dominates. Nothing bad on LA. That’s great, and we certainly need that. But we also need to be able to have on-the-ground organizers in San Diego, and we need to have the Inland Empire people who are rapidly coming up for different reasons. Also up north, way north, we’re beginning to see a lot more activity in that whole area right in Lake, Mendocino, Humboldt and even parts of Del Norte, and again there isn’t anything that has jelled up there. So this idea of representation is going to help in a large way with all of that.
Insofar, though, as Fresno is concerned and that whole area, one of the things I remember asking—I think I asked [San Joaquin Valley Democratic Club President] James Williams and [Madera County Central Committee Chair] Susan Rowe—was how do you see the central corridor? I think it tells you a lot that these people see themselves in a way that the Bay Area or LA doesn’t see them. That needs to be addressed, and it needs to be taken care of. If we want to grow this caucus, we have to do that. Not only grow the caucus but to actually have an airtight kind of consensus going into anything, we need to be able to have that organization there. And we need to have the leaders that the activists on the ground recognize as area leaders.
Q: Anything else that you would like to address?
A: I’m new at this in terms of the chairmanship, or the chairwomanship. I honestly hadn’t expected to serve as a single chair. I thought that at the end of the day I would be serving as a co-chair. So that part of this is new territory. But I know what it is that I believe needs to happen with the caucus. I’m worried that the people might think that we’re not focusing on the issues. But I want to tell you that to the best of my ability I hope that we will always be responsive to any issues that arise while we work on putting our house in order in a way that is going to make us something that we can really be proud of.
As the person at the helm, I fully intend to be very responsive to the issues, but I have to say that my first priority has got to be infrastructure building. I can promise you that if everyone just knuckles down and we do this, we will be happy with what we come up with. Because we’ll be able to look back on this and say we built this. I’m appreciative of everything that’s gone before us because those people had the difficult task of starting this whole darn thing.
From now on, what has to happen is we actually have to be very serious about building a structure that is going to be very effective, being something that can be recognized. I based my campaign on that, and I knew that while I was campaigning, toward the end especially, that if I didn’t have a decent showing at the election in terms of my numbers and the campaign and what I was able to put together and the numbers and the way that the campaign itself was organized, that was going to indicate to people what I was either capable of or not capable of with the caucus itself once I got there. I want people to know the kind of passion that I put into the campaign and how effective that campaign was, and it was very effective, I think, by anyone’s standards. I fully intend to apply that effort to putting together the caucus.
I have talked a lot about nuts and bolts and about infrastructure building and so on. But I don’t want there to be any mistake about it that the issues are always going to be there for us. And we will be issue-driven. That’s not going to change.
One of the issues that I forgot to mention that progressives will talk about a lot is the restoration of the constitution. We’re seeing that now what with some of the things that are going on with Obama and the Military Commissions Act, the issue of torture and so on. That’s going to be a very interesting discussion because we’re going to need to be artful about the way we apply heat to the party leadership as progressives, and as people who care about restoring the constitution, and at the same time not doing the work of the Republicans in trying to go after them to the point where we hurt the Democrats too much politically. That will be a delicate issue, but we have to do it. We can’t not do it just because it’s hard to do.
While I was campaigning—the way that I ran the campaign itself and the way that the people who were most instrumental in helping me win—we took this race very seriously. When I say we, I don’t just see this as myself winning, but we took this race very seriously and as such we actually campaigned in a way that probably exceeded any expectation people had for campaigning for a caucus seat.
I went around the state to get endorsements and meet people. It was a campaign. Most of the places that I went I would look into the room and I saw the same faces over and over, and they were the faces of the other [CDP] office candidates, not candidates for other caucuses. Don’t forget that every caucus had their own elections, not just the Progressive Caucus.
In addition to all of the party offices, it was elections all around. But when I went around the state, I mainly saw party office candidates. I think I was pretty much the only one running for a caucus that was out there stumping. The reason why I did that was to show that I was very serious not only about the campaign, but I I wanted to underscore the fact that the Progressive Caucus is a large and influential caucus. I wanted to underscore that fact and recognize that by treating this campaign on that level. I figured that if I did that, the people I would meet and speak to, the various central committees that I visited and the clubs and all of the events, they themselves would see that too.
The interesting thing was that with the exception of one central committee, none said we’re not going to consider an endorsement for you because it’s a caucus race. I only had one central committee that did that. The rest of them didn’t even flinch, and they readily endorsed in that race. It was the first time that they had done that as central committees in a caucus race. The reason for that is the Progressive Caucus is recognized as a very large and influential caucus. What I did was to underscore the importance of that caucus, and it was very purposeful.
The other thing about that is that I felt that if I ran a very good campaign and we had a significant victory that would serve as an example to the caucus members themselves that if I was able to do this with this race and get them to understand the importance of organization and numbers they could then try to imagine how that could be applied to anything that we would want to accomplish in the caucus itself. And that was perhaps the most important thing to me. That they would see that as a case study and practice.
I can’t tell you that I did not expect to win. I knew that I had a very good chance to win. I just didn’t know that it would be like it was. The numbers were unbelievable to me. Not just because I prevailed but I just didn’t expect that. And I feel vindicated. I made my case. I made the case that what was this was about wasn’t just about policy or ideas, although believe me I think it’s very important to have a party and an organization that has ideas and vision. If we don’t have that, what’s the point? I get all that. But what I really wanted to show them was that without knowing how to organize, none of those things can come to fruition. So it was very important for me that it was more than just a campaign to me. This was me trying to show them that this is what we need to do. This is what we need to do as a caucus. Just like this.
And I feel like it worked. It is one of the things I will be communicating the next time we meet. I hope that they understand that. If they can look at it that way, we can move beyond any feelings of bitterness. I really think that instead the way we ought to be looking at it is what can we do with what happened in this race, how can we apply that to say our next big battle, for example, the death penalty. I mean it’s a constant big battle we’re having with the party on that. Or anything else.