Convention Report:
Iowa's 1st District
The First Congressional District Convention was held in Jones County, at the Monticello High School. About 630 delegates were entitled to attend and 450 actually showed up. Although it was not easy, we did manage to have a viable group. Viability was 68, and Dean had 54 seated delegates, Edwards 80, Kucinich 1, and the rest for Kerry. But our very able Scott County Coordinator (CC), Chuck Galer, who seems to have a sixth sense allowing him to detect a Dean supporter even if they have a Kerry delegate tag hanging around their neck, had identified in advance 8 or 9 people who said they would realign with Dean, so we remained optimistic.
It probably took the whole hour allotted for realignment, and there was some confusion about the rules, but we managed to sway enough people, mostly Kerry delegates, to switch that we ended up with 74 (68 needed) delegates. We had some very nice Kerry delegates come to us almost without our asking. They wanted us to be able to send on a national delegate.
Other Kerry supporters got up and raved about "unity" and how it was important to send a message to the country that all of Iowa was behind Kerry, so they should NOT let Dean be viable. Those statements actually convinced some Kerry people to help us, because it made them mad! LOL
I personally had some negotiations with some of the top Kerry people, who were not swayed by my arguments. They think "unity" is vital. I said there are 2 ways to "unify" the party behind Kerry. One is to make everyone who wasn't a Kerry supporter feel unwelcome and get them to leave the party. If you shrink the party until only Kerry supporters are left, that will definitely "unify" the party behind Kerry. But I said, wouldn't it be better to include everyone, and have them stay in the party and work to defeat GWB however they want, even if they aren't ready to work directly for Kerry at this time? I think it is more important to enlarge the party and get more people involved if we want Kerry to beat Bush. I am especially concerned about keeping young people interested in the Democratic Party.
We had to elect a woman delegate, and we had 2 very good female candidates (and 4 very good male candidates, who I felt bad about not being able to go). We ended up electing Elesha Gayman, a very impressive 25 year old who is a co-founder of QCAction.org, a MoveOn-type local Quad Cities group. I am very impressed with QCAction, and hope we can work together with them. I want Elesha to write up something for the blog, with contact info so Dean people can share their concerns with her and she can better represent us in Boston.
I did hand out many DFIA flyers, at least 100 Blog for Iowa pins, and many sign up sheets for DFIA. Most people seemed very receptive. We managed to get contact info for the 74 people who ended up in our room. Black Hawk County is a den of Dean activity, and I have high hopes we will soon have a CC there (perhaps co-CC's).
I also managed to find people to deliver all 11 "Myth Breakers for Election Officials" documents. Hopefully they got them delivered today (April 27). I recommend you all read the document. It is fascinating. Most of my delivery people are Dean people, but I also enlisted a few Kerry and Edwards delegates.
Overall, our convention went fairly well and was well run. The voting seemed tedious, but maybe it has to be done that way. Being able to connect with Dean people in other counties was definitely the best part. I look forward to doing even more recruiting for DFIA at the State Convention in June.
Alta Price
aprice@democracyforiowa.com
