Code Neon Blue!

(The conclusion of my report on last weekend’s State Assembly and Convention, in case you couldn’t tell.)

Because CD4 ran so long, it was technically Saturday when I went to bed. I have to say, the bed I had at the Doubletree was excellent. As soon as my body stopped saying, “Seriously? We’re finally done for the day? You don’t want to get up and find a line to stand in somewhere?” (I have a very sarcastic body), I was out like a light. Barely noticed the breeze as my roomie whooshed in and out, still doing his volunteer thing at 2:30 am!

Next morning, after breakfast at the hotel with part of our Prowers group, I headed for the World Arena, joining a line of cars long enough to make a fine parade in any city. Our Chair, Randa, was going to go by the Hampden first, to leave a note vouching for the legitimate voter status of our mysteriously non-databased delegate. (Which worked! He didn’t fight his way down to our floor seats, but he got to vote okay!)

Both parking and check-in went very smoothly for me. Naturally I can’t speak to other people’s experience here, but all of the police I ran across seemed to have been hand-picked for being extra super-duper friendly. Many of the ones I met were making an effort at chatty remarks and big smiles as they did their security jobs. I hope that bodes well for the DNC in Denver in August!

I started running into friends right away in the vendor section of the World Arena. I won’t name the names because I am sure to forget some…also there were a lot of them and I can already tell this will be another really long post. But they know who they are. Seeing them was one of the best parts of the day!

It was a pleasant surprise to find Prowers and a number of the other smallish county groups had gotten really good seats close to the main stage. It almost made up for the fact that the wifi was also blocked here at the World Arena. I did not think to do as some SMART bloggers did and go to the press room…oh, well, live and learn.

Another live and learn moment — someone (Dan Slater, I understand) put together a lot of cleverly appropriate movie clips and songs to go with the reports from various departments of the state party, plus a really good vid to the song Right Now. It only occurred to me days later than I could have recorded them in movie format with my camera and saved them for posterity. Dang.

All of the actual newsy events from the con-sembly have long since been reported, so all I have left to write about is my impressions of what it was like being there in the massive 10,000 person throng. Brace yourself.

Speeches: There were lots. Apparently it takes one nominator and up to half a dozen seconders (ALL giving speeches) to legally put a candidate up to run for office. And then of course the candidate has to make an acceptance speech.

For those who weren’t there, here’s a very short summation of how most of the speeches went: Bush is bad. We are facing many problems because Bush and the Republicans are bad. If the Dems get in, we will fix these problems. Lather, rinse, repeat, infinity.

Maybe some of you are now saying, “Susan, you’re being pretty critical. Do you think you can do better?” Yes, I do think that, as a matter of fact. And there are buckets of other people who can, as well. You may have seen a few of them on the internet here and there.

Mark Udall (who was actually pretty good, and can mostly excuse himself from this rant) repeated the Jay Leno joke about politics being show biz for ugly people. Judging from what I sat through for what seemed like decades over the course of the weekend, politics is also stand-up for unfunny people.

Seriously, speech-writers, just because you’re preaching to the choir, you don’t have to read us the WHOLE Dem Bible.

Of course there were some speeches I thought were good. When I say good, I mean speeches that were unique because they came from the heart, like Maggie Fox talking about her husband Mark Udall. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona governor, showed you can take the generic stump speech formula I just complained about and zing it up into something both entertaining and inspiring. Hank Eng gave a good example of a quick bio speech.

My point still remains that with some serious editing of the majority of the speeches, we could have been out of there a couple hours sooner, in a much happier frame of mind.

Overall, I think the thing I hated the most was the chanting wars that kept breaking out all weekend. I know loud, enthusiastic responses at a rally are traditional. I’m fine with cheering good lines during a speech, then throwing a Standing O, with many huzzahs, at the end of same. I can whoop and holler pretty darn loud myself when the occasion requires, and I’m not at all too shy to do so.

But it’s my personal opinion that the mindless cheer-fights which interrupted Every Single Bit of Business both days, (and I am absolutely looking at BOTH groups of presidential candidate supporters here) isn’t uplifting or fun or cute. It’s juvenile. Simplifying political stands with an Us vs. Them sports mentality is one of the things that is WRONG with how we do politics in America today.

Think I’m just being cranky? Introduce me to ONE person who EVER switched allegiances to a cause or candidate because they thought the other side cheered louder and waved their signs more maniacally.

On the other hand, you can feel free to dismiss my opinion as that of a crotchety old grandma, because I also thought Saturday’s music in the Arena was way too loud.

I’ll conclude with a very short version of my take on the whole event overall.

It seems to me that we were the victims of a ‘perfect storm’; the confluence of way more participants than usual, a lack of vital resources (time and volunteers, but mainly MONEY) and the bad luck of losing a whole hotel’s worth of space with little notice. I think the state party did the best they could with what they had to work with. It was a miracle that they managed to get things to a successful conclusion by Saturday evening. If these problems had been caused by incompetence, the situation would have been a hundred times worse, and we might not even have a legally acceptable result at this point.

I think the single worst problem area is the database. This is not meant as a ding on Mike W. Maintaining a big database of any kind is a difficult challenge, and when you get your data from 64 wildly different counties, errors are going to creep in. That’s just a given.

If any one department at state headquarters is to get more help and money in the near future, it needs to be the tech department. We had 9 delegates and 7 alternates from Prowers. Out of those 16 people, there turned out to be 2 major errors in the database by convention time, or 1 out of 8. It might just be an anomaly, but if that’s the standard rate of error in this database, it needs some major fixing up, pronto.

To end on a positive note, this new method of voting, where a worker scans bar codes on your credentials and a ballot, seems to go VERY fast. All that is needed to make it a total winner is for tables and chairs to be provided so that people can have a usable surface to work on as they flip through the pages while marking their ballots.

In case it doesn’t show, I’m glad I went — I had a great time, on average. I hope anyone who feels overly criticized takes my words in the spirit of helpfulness I intended. And if anything I said STILL bothers someone, remember this is the opinion of someone who thinks its a cool idea to dye her hair blue.