I have been a union guy all my life, and even in “retirement,” I’ll be union till I die.
I support the public employees in Wisconsin and everywhere else. I was proud to attend the rally in the WA state capitol of Olympia on Monday February 21, when we packed the Capitol Rotunda with more than 1,000 supporters.
I did what I could to promote Saturday’s rally in Olympia, which drew about 2,500 people, far outnumbering, by an estimated 10 to 1, the pathetic turnout of Tea Party supporters of the execrable Scott Walker.
But I had other business, and once I heard about this one particular event, I knew it had to take priority.
King County, which includes Seattle, is by far the largest county in Washington, with 28.75 percent of the state’s population, according to 2009 Census estimates. An overwhelming Democratic turnout and performance in King County can swing darn near any statewide race—especially now that WA, thankfully, is almost entirely a vote-by-mail state.
Democratic turnout in King County in the 2010 election was 71 percent, well above what our Republican Secretary of State had predicted it would be. It enabled us to, among other things, unseat a longtime right-wing state Supreme Court justice.
The stakes are high in WA for 2012. I’m not talking about the presidency. Obama is going to be re-elected, and he’s going to carry WA handily. He’s not my concern. Maria Cantwell isn’t my concern either. The GOP can’t touch her, and they won’t even try. I’m focused on the race for Governor.
Republican two-term Attorney General Rob McKenna is expected to run for Governor. He is a dangerous man, mostly because he has avoided appearing to be a flaming right-winger. He comes across as a moderate, claims to be pro-choice, and has managed to fool one hell of a lot of people in this state, especially Democrats who have turned off their bullshit detectors in some misguided effort to appear “fair.”
McKenna has become a lot of liberals’ “pet Republican.” If I had a dollar for every Democrat who has told me “oh, McKenna’s not that bad,” I’d be lying on some beach on a tropical island somewhere without a care in the world.
But sorry, he IS that bad. The same people who bankroll Scott Walker, John Kasich, Rick Scott, Chris Christie, Paul LePage, and Jan Brewer will be bankrolling McKenna, and his foot soldiers will be the same lot as theirs. If he is elected, they will want their payback, and the same sorry cycle we have seen in other states will repeat itself here.
But more and more, as Democrats watch the events in Wisconsin with horror, they are starting to get that every vote will count in 2012. Chris Gregoire, after all, won the governorship by 133 votes in 2004, after three recounts. We know what field work does. Field wins elections.
I have long suspected that the 29 percent in King County who didn’t vote in 2010, and thousands more who aren’t even registered, can be found in our minority and immigrant communities. What hard data we have is inconclusive, but anecdotal information indicates that this is the case.
The task remains, then, for the Democratic Party in King County to mount a massive voter registration drive in our minority communities, to track the voters who we register, and to have volunteers from their communities, if possible, call them at election time, remind them to mail in their ballots, remind them to vote Democratic—and why.
So I’ll give you all one guess which damn fool masochist drew up this program, and signed up to head the effort.
It can’t be a “top-down” or “one size fits all” plan. It will have to evolve, community by community, legislative district by legislative district, group by group, registration site by registration site.
But who better to start with first—than with the First Citizens?
That’s why I passed up the rally Saturday and trucked up to Auburn, to the Muckleshoot Casino, to the conference entitled “Empowering the Native American Community: Civic Engagement and Preparing to Run for Office.”
I know several activists in the various tribes already, as some of them are active in the Democratic Party in WA. I have some years of experience registering voters on reservations and at powwows. So the organizers, former Democratic State Senator Claudia Kauffman and the folks at Progressive Majority, knew me already and welcomed my presence. Claudia is Nez Perce, works for the Muckleshoot, and to the best of anyone’s knowledge, was the first Native American woman elected to a State Senate seat anywhere in the U.S.
The conference was geared toward recruiting Native American candidates and letting them know what resources are available to help new candidates. Progressive Majority has a good record in getting “farm team” candidates elected to municipal offices in WA. Their record is somewhat more spotty at the state legislative level, but some pretty good legislative candidates have won recently with their support.
It was a good conference. It explained many of the “nuts and bolts” of campaigning and of participating in campaigns. Claudia and several other Native elected officials and campaign activists gave the necessary insight into what it “felt like” to participate at this level. Many attendees gave their personal accounts of the high and low points that they had encountered in their political activity, at whatever level. I felt that this was essential information for anyone relatively new to the political process.
Quite a few tribes were represented, not all of which, by a long shot, are native to WA. Tribes I remember off the top of my head were Yakama, Puyallup, Muckleshoot, Snoqualmie, and Quileute, all from WA, but also Nez Perce, Tlingit, Lakota, Navajo, Choctaw, and Mohegan. I'm sure there were others; not everyone stated a tribal affiliation.
One other participant, Antonio, gave me and everyone else some very valuable insights, and exposed me to a dynamic that I hadn’t considered.
He represented the P’urhepecha people, from the state of Michoacán, in Mexico. He said he had come to this conference for Native Americans because his people had had no luck trying to organize with other Mexican-Americans—“the Latinos,” as he called them.
The P’urhepecha, a Zapotecan people, number about 1,000 in Western Washington, according to Antonio. They take their tribal identity very seriously, and are determined to retain its integrity. But as if the issues of racial and ethnic prejudice—in their case at the hands of other Mexican-Americans—economic and employment discrimination, health care, and education that other Native Americans face weren’t enough, they face language and immigration issues, too.
Antonio told me most of the P’urhepecha live in my legislative district. You can bet I’ll be doing some voter registration and outreach there.
I gave my pitch for voter registration and its value, and people recognized its value and volunteered to help. As always, one thing led to another. One participant, from the Yakama Nation, is a junior at the University of Washington, and she mentioned that her group would be needing some help organizing their spring powwow on campus. When I got home, I e-mailed my daughter, also a junior at UW and one HELL of a political organizer on campus, to get them some help and to enlist the Native students in lobbying efforts against budget cuts.
This girl’s father was in attendance, and I remembered him as a former candidate for State Legislature, whom we had traveled east of the mountains to help in 2006. He remembered me also, and I asked him to say hello to some of the Yakama I knew from party work.
It was a good beginning to a long campaign. Needless to say, I’ll be doing outreach in African American communities, African immigrant communities, different Asian-American communities (the Hindus and Sikhs here are EXTREMELY well organized, and they are solidly Democratic. More on that later; it’s a hell of a story), and of course, the various Latino communities.
I usually limit myself to comments here and don’t write a lot of diaries. But now that I have some stories to tell, I’ll be telling them. So stay tuned for more of this as I continue.
If anyone reading this is in King County WA, I’ll need your help. I won’t be able to accomplish this alone. But I am, after all, an experienced field organizer, and by election Day 2012, I will expect to have accomplished what any good field organizer sets out to do—organize myself out of a job, having trained and empowered hundreds of volunteers to perform it. At least that’s the plan, haha.