Party Animal

I am serving again in the County Republican Party Senate District Convention this month. Damn, that's a mouthful! Basically I'll be Secretary of the Convention at the end of the month. It's a lovely job, too. I get to sit up in the front of the room where everyone can see me, record the voting strength of each precinct for posterity and for voting purposes, tally and record any roll call votes, and occasionally make a nusiance of myself. More on that later.

But I love being in party politics. When I go to meetings, people are always talking about candidates, with far more knowledge than the average person has. It's like they're all privy to the stuff you only WISH you knew about your candidates. I feel smarter, and better-informed, just standing in the same room with them. And once I get back into convention mode, I'm speaking a different language. I actually sound, well,... smart on occasion.

When I first got involved in the convention process, it was because I went to a "How to Get Involved" seminar at church in 1998. Bill , who was in the meeting tonight, was one of the people who led the seminar, and Bill is probably one of eighteen people in the Northern Hemisphere who understands completely Robert's Rules of Order. From memory. When Bill speaks, I sit up and listen with everything I have, because whatever it is, it's intelligent. It could be the most mundane of rules or procedures, and he can invest the discussion with an importance that makes you panic lest the Right Thing is not done. You want to run out and slay dragons at his request; you want to march boldly up to a microphone in front of 5,000 people and plead his cause with him. Except when you don't.

Two years ago, at the local convention, I was also serving as secretary. I got the post in the time-honored tradition of the Grand Old Party: I called up the Chairman and volunteered. He was ecstatic because he had no secretary and no prospect of one. A cushy job, he said, unless there's a roll call vote. Then we'll be there to help you. But that doesn't happen really often at all.

And a roll call vote - what's that? It's when a hall full of people vote by shouting and the verdict is uncertain because some people out in the convention floor are very very good shouters. When someone is disgusted enough at the unfairly loud voters, they will move for a roll call vote. In that instance, everything stops. Except for the secretary.

Then, the secretary has to go precinct by precinct and report the votes from each delegation. So if my delegation had 35 votes possible, and 5 people attending (which will be the case this year) then each one of us gets 7 votes. So a 2-3 vote in my precinct comes out 14-21. Multiply that by about 60 precincts and there's an hour wasted. At least. Not to mention fractions of votes. It requires a computer and a spreadsheet at minimum.

And the roll call votes ALWAYS happen when we debate resolutions. You know; Resolved: that The Honorable Stick Stickley, District Judge, should remove his cranium from his rectal region and step down. Or whatever. Someone wants to take out a word, add a word, strike a paragraph. That's all part of how it works. And people who come for their first time to a political meeting of this nature WANT to have the resolutions reflect their views. After all, these resolutions get mixed together with resolutions from other counties and districts and combine to be the State Platform, which in turn combines with other states' resolutions to become the National Platform. Which is the general consensus of what Republican voters think Republican candidates and officeholders ought to do to be able to call themselves Republicans. Seems eminently fair to me.

So in the beginning of the resolutions discussion at convention 2 years ago, someone made a motion to pass as a whole the entire platform, without amendment, that had been handed out a half hour before for review. Now I read fast, but not that fast. And with this stuff, I need to digest it first. I thought others might as well. We had to pass something out of convention to go to State with, and the executive committe was really ready to go home after a long day, so they had tried to gin it up beforehand. They would move to pass it, accept it, and get out.

Well, people were getting upset; they came to debate, to take part in the process, and they wanted a discussion. So Fish stepped up.

I requested the microphone and then addressed the convention. I told them all that while it was a nice thing to get the business of the convention done quickly, it was much more important that the people who came, especially the people who came for the first time that day, felt as though they had a say in adopting the resolutions. I said in front of everyone that the effect of their strategy was to stifle all meaningful debate on the resolutions, and that before they proceeded, they ought to take a vote to see whether the delegates actually wanted to examine the resolution a section at a time.

This made me very very unpopular with the executive committee. Especially since we had a couple of roll call votes after that, and were the LAST convention to finish business at 10:00 p.m. that night.

But let me say this: last year at church one day, a mommy of a preschooler came up to me and said "You're Miss Fish! I remember you from convention! You're the one who made sure we got to debate all those resolutions! I was so proud of you! You did a great job standing up for us delegates!"

That right there made it worth it. And anyway, nobody else wanted to be secretary again this year, so what else were they going to do? They let me come back and play again this year. And nobody even referred to the incident, so I guess they've all forgotten it. Even Bill.

But they had better not try it again this year. Fishie is ready for battle.