During the weekend of June 10-11, over 900 county delegates to the WV Democratic Convention met in Charleston. We were ready to try answering our party’s call for unity. On Saturday, after sitting through 2 hours of speech after speech, some amazing, some disgusting (which we walked out on), we met to vote on amendments to the WV Democratic platform. I had been impressed by all the college students and young professionals who had written many of the amendments, which ranged from ending mountain top removal to eliminating Super PACS. The energy in the room was positive and productive. We moved fairly smoothly through the first hour of the meeting.
We were seated by county, and as I looked around, I noticed that whole counties’ seats were empty. Of course, three hours in, we were all starving-no food was available at all anywhere in the convention center, all day. As the platform meeting stretched to 2:00, I noticed that, for hunger and whatever other reason, many of the delegates had left for good. The fact that we almost didn’t have enough of a quorum to complete the platform became apparent; conveniently, perhaps, just as we got ready to start discussing removing superdelegates! So there was a quorum call, and everyone scrambled to find anybody loitering, taking a long smoke, stuck in a bathroom, to come back to the hall. When I asked my fellow delegate Gayle Rancer what she thought of all of this she said
when we needed a quorum we reached out to and chased down delegates, who were happy to return. The Executive Committee chose to remain uninvolved in steering the platform and resolutions. That's not leadership. The chairwoman chose to be uninvolved in the process and did not witness the hours' long work hammering out this platform, and, is again showing a lack of real leadership by dismissing and belittling the work of these energized, passionate and dedicated young bloods to the party.
We were finally able to continue, and so we did, energetically and cooperatively, for almost another 3 hours. In the end, the amendments mostly passed enthusiastically and with little debate from either Clinton or Sanders supporters; even a resolution asking Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign was passed without a single “nay.” We were proud that we were all able to come together to deliver this exciting new platform to our fellow Democrats.
Despite all their talk of “unity,” however, I’m not sure that this is the type of unity that our Democratic party wants. It turned out that while we were downstairs, starving and almost lacking a quorum, 75 or so of the Executive Committee was having a Joe Manchin-sponsored luncheon upstairs…and unseating our boy wonder, Vice Chairman Chris Regan. In the aftermath of passing the country’s most progressive party platform, the chairwoman of the WV Democratic Party was quoted as calling the Wasserman-Schultz resolution a “slap in the face,” ignoring the fact that Clinton supporters had voted for it as well. She even asserted that the platform would make it difficult for candidates to win elections, among other unflattering comments. The platform passed, almost unanimously; isn’t that something to be proud of? Instead, she made it sound as though the amendments had been written by little children who didn’t know what they were doing. Please.. don’t tell me about unity. I held it in when a Hillary mean girl came by, screaming at me that we should all leave, that Bernie was negative energy. (everybody else was very nice).
If the establishment Democrats aren’t going to listen to our young people, the party will die. If you don’t want to progress, you don’t want to participate, let’s give those empty seats iin the hall to the next generation.. They want progress. We want progress. Progress requires Progressiveness. Let’s be progressive.