Saturday morning business was devoted to the Bylaws
Committee Report.
Proposals 1 and 2 were minor technical cleanups that passed without
debate. Proposal 3 was to add a requirement that candidates for
the five party offices be party members. Harland Harrison
successfully requested debate, and when he disputed the voice vote and
called for a standing vote, 80% of the delegates stood to approve
it. Harrison also called for debate on proposal 4, and the
convention voted it down in apparent agreement with Alan Rice's
analysis that a simple majority of ExCom should not be able to rescind
an endorsement if a convention had given it. Proposal 5 failed,
leaving it mandatory that the Judicial Committee hear appeals of
membership suspensions. Proposal 6 easily passed,
institutionalizing the use of web sites over paper for satisfying
member requests for party documents.
Proposal 7 was presented as codifying the Bylaws Committee's admirable
practice of doing its work early, but it also contained a provision
requiring 2/3 approval for late changes proposed outside the committee
process. This was inevitably going to inspire resistance from those
suspicious of the party leadership, so when Starchild voiced general
opposition, I proposed that the 2/3 provision be considered
separately. The remainder of the proposal passed easily, and
after protracted debate and wordsmithing clarified the 2/3 rule, it too
finally passed. Proposals 8 and 9 passed, making the Judicial
Committee a two-year office that may hold meetings by voice or video
conference.
Proposal 10 was a controversial effort to let counties set their own
membership requirements and set and collect dues independently of the
LPCA. Outgoing Chairman Aaron Starr made an impassioned offer to
immediately and personally donate $15K to the counties if it passed. (I
had expressed support of this effort to simplify the perennially
fouled-up revenue-sharing between the state and the counties, but my
mind started being changed by considerations about economies of
scale. When Aaron complained that the current 60/40 county-heavy
split made LPCA fundraising inefficient, that undid my support, since I
think the state LPCA focuses too much on fundraising just to raise
money to finance the next round of fundraising.) Proposal 10
failed, with me voting against.
Proposal 10a allowed each ExCom member to sponsor for convention
credentialing a member who would otherwise be too new to be seated. I
voted against this proposal, agreeing with Starchild that this useful
power should belong to the convention instead of to ExCom, but it
passed (and was soon used to seat seven new members. Proposal 11
was to eliminate county apportionment of convention delegates, and make
any 90-day-tenured member automatically seated at conventions.
The convention passed it on agreement with M Carling's argument that no
other state has such a rule, but I voted against it on the grounds that
the LPCA alternates conventions in the north and south of a state with
by far the longest north-south axis in America. These were the
only two proposals in which I voted on the losing side.
We thus only got through 11 of the 24 Bylaws proposals in the allotted
time, and when we broke for lunch we were at 101 registered delegates.
The officer elections started with the Chair race, in which Bruce Cohen
apparently bowed out in view of the widespread support for Kevin
Takenaga. Thus many people were surprised when James Ogle
nominated himself to oppose Kevin. Ogle said he was a
"self-employed artist, and I need a job, that's why I'm running."
It's unclear whether he knew the office is unpaid, but he then made it
clear that his primary cause was an online virtual government
simulation that he was promoting, complete with a map dividing
California into 12 mini-states.
Takenaga emphasized the need for coalition building, noting that it
"doubles our manpower". His top priority is development of county
parties, since counties are "where all the action is at". He
wants local Libertarians to "reach out to people within your own
community", and pointed out that "everyone agrees with us on something
-- half agree
with half of our positions, the other half agree with the other
half.". (I'd be interested to know where the LP or LPCA platforms
could be split to produce such a result -- which is just a snarky way
of agreeing with Kevin's larger point that the LP can be more
mainstream than it has been.) Kevin won 83-3, with 4 for NOTA.
Outgoing Northern Vice Chair nominated his successor Richard Newell,
and Takenaga seconded effusively, saying "every great leader needs a
team". Before being elected by acclamation, Rich gave an impressive and
impassioned speech arguing for a bottom-up approach to LP electoral
politics. He said the experience of Badnarik and Smither in 2006
show that "the public is not ready to vote for us" even when our
candidates have big-time money or a write-in opponent with a
hard-to-spell name. "The public
is not going to put us into higher office until we've proven we can
govern effectively at lower levels first. Let's get real." He
cautioned that there would be no LP landslide victories in D.C. or
state capitols, and pointed to John Inks and Norm Westwell as models of
modest success built on the hard work of speaking at public meetings
and building credibility in municipal politics. Rich said he "would
like
to activate a few more counties during my term", and said Dan Minkoff
[sp?] would be taking over Rich's media relations operation. "All
the
heavy lifting has to be done at the
county level", and the LPCA should mainly monitor Sacramento and do
just the things that require economies of scale. "Being on the outside
and throwing rocks may be fun, but it's not very effective."
I'm glad that we're going to have energetic leaders to test this
"farm-team" strategy for LP success, but I would not agree that
statewide and federal electioneering cannot have positive influence
without a farm team that can threaten to win control of a statehouse,
legislative house, or White House. The Socialist Party only had
two congressmen and never won more than 6% of the popular Presidential
vote, but Milton Friedman famously called
it the most influential party in early-twentieth-century America
because almost all of its 1928 platform's economic planks became law in
the subsequent decades. There are very strict limits on how
much good (say) an LP-controlled school board could do, and that any
path toward a significantly free market in education soon reaches a
dead end if it doesn't go through Sacramento or Washington.
Zander Collier won Southern Vice Chair by acclamation, as did Beau Cain
win Secretary. Cain has previously been a professional secretary
for ten years, and is finishing three years on the board of the Society
For Technical Communication. Cain elicited another
richly-deserved round of applause for outgoing secretary Dan Wiener,
who had earlier received a standing ovation at the beginning of the
Secretary election.
In winning Treasurer by acclamation, Don Cowles added a little spark to
what was in effect the fifth straight walkover victory. He began
his speech by taking James Ogle's map of California's 12 virtual
mini-states and setting it up near the stage -- then suddenly stopped
and said "I scared you guys, didn't I?" He revealed that he had
proposed to nickname the Takenaga slate "the nuts and bolts, but I was
told immediately there are no bolts in the LP."
The nominations for Executive Committee were next. M Carling
honored and embarrassed me when he said "I worked at the the Hoover
Institute for three years. I nominate for ExCom the deepest
thinker in the Libertarian Party -- Brian Holtz." I vouched that
I didn't know M would say that, and continued: "Instead of killing
trees for pamphlets, I paid the convention for the
privilege of spamming most of you with some ideas for the party, and I
hope you were persuaded enough to earn your vote. If you never
saw the
email, then you can take that either as evidence that my approach is
not a good one, or as evidence that we need to get better at modern
communication technology. And if any of you really really hate
trees,
I do have a few paper copies you can ask me for."
The nominees and votes earned were as follows, with the top five
winning 2-year terms:
Ted Brown 70
Camden McConnell 61
Laurence Samuels 58
Brian Holtz 53
Mike McMahon 52
Matthew Barnes 51 (wins 1-year term)
Bruce Dovner 46
Jesse Thomas 40
Starchild 33
My prediction had been that I would come in fifth to the four
incumbents Brown Dovner Samuels McConnell (in that order), followed by
Starchild, Barnes, and Thomas/McMahon. I was surprised that
Dovner and Starchild received so few votes, since both are well-known
and (in my opinion) very thoughtful. Starchild wore his butterfly
wings as he invoked the five principles of the Grassroots
Caucus, and while I thought his pitch for such self-expression in
such a friendly room was not unreasonable, I suspect that his
flamboyant appearance made his vote count understate the amount of
potential agreement with him that was in the room.
The Judicial Committee election seated the top five among:
Bob Weber 70
Allan Hacker 68
Dan Wiener 58
Rick Nichol 58
M Carling 57 (later elected JudCom Chair)
Ed Bowers 37
A motion failed that proposed to cede the ExCom Alternates choice to
the ExCom itself to allow the time to be used for more Bylaws
debate. The election seated the top two of
Chuck Moulton 47
Jesse Thomas 38
Michael Seebeck 30
Starchild 30
Moulton is the national LP Vice Chair, and was available for a 1-year
alternate slot because he will be spending the next year at San Jose
State in a master's program in Austrian economics. This is a
wonderful bonus for the LPCA, and for any of us on ExCom who want to
hear the latest in Austrian economic theory.
I had to return home upon adjournment to resume my share of the
babysitting duties for our three young girls, and break the news to
Melisse that my new ExCom duties would impose even more babysitting
work on her in the next couple years. She was not exactly
thrilled at the choice that the convention made. :-)
During the Sunday afternoon business session, the registered delegate
count hovered around 99 (compared to its peak of about 105), and we
almost had to lock people in to maintain our quorum of 49. This
put us in the interesting situation that any two or three delegates
could block changes to the Platform, which requires 2/3 of those voting
but 50%+1 of the registered delegates. Nevertheless, we gamely pushed
forward with consideration of the Platform Committee's report.
Item 1 called for repeal of the Real ID act, and passed. Item 2
successfully fixed the apparent contradiction between opposing strict
liability and supporting it for on-the-job injuries, by changing the
latter language. Item 3 was to oppose any wall or fence on
California's border with Mexico, and failed. Item 4 was a
proposal by Starchild to oppose incarceration upon arrest when there is
no immediate physical threat from the accused. The delegates were
sympathetic to the principle, but were not willing to write by
committee on the floor the language the proposal should have already
had concerning questions of bail, crimes of violence, etc. Item 5
was to oppose holding reporters in contempt for not revealing their
sources. I was willing to support this only with an exception for
the Sixth Amendment right of the accused to have subpoena power, saying
"if a reporting is hiding the name of the witness who can save me from
the death penalty, I want that reporter to sing". A few other
delegates had even stronger objections, and so this item failed
too. Item 6 changed "is comprised of" to "comprises". Item
7's call for proportional representation and multi-member districts was
overwhelmingly rejected. Enough delegates opposed item 8's
language about deployment of US armed forces beyond America's
borders.to cause it to fail too.
There were no resolutions offered for consideration, and the
penultimate item of business was the announcement that a contract had
been signed to host the 2008 convention on a cruise the weekend of
April 18 from Los Angeles to Encenada. Informed that we were $188 short
of raising $5000 in donations this weekend, Aaron inspired the
delegates to hand over tens and twenties, and had easily reached the 5K
mark by the time he persuaded Kevin Takenaga to empty his wallet for
the cause. Retiring Chair Aaron Starr then handed the gavel over
to incoming Chair Kevin Takenaga, in front of a dozen cameras and the
loud applause of delegates grateful for Aaron's six years of service.
The new Executive Committee met after the convention adjourned.
In public comments, Jonathan Zwickel discussed his complaint to the
Judicial Committee concerning the current dues structure, and Aaron
Starr responded that he was still willing to defend the ExCom in that
case on the grounds of its dues-setting power under Bylaw 5.1.C.
He also said he will be continuing to work on the conversion from MYOB
to DonorPerfect and Quickbooks, and on compiling the mailing addresses
of all elected officials in the state. Executive Director Angela
Keaton reported a 2% return rate on a recent renewal mailing, and that
work proceeds on integrating DonorPerfect with the web site's
order-taking feature.
ExCom voted to offer Tom Cipos a three-month trial as editor of
California Freedom. Cipos is Vice Chair of the LA County LP and a
contributor to the Libertarian Perspective. Keaton will be
supervising Cipos, in lieu of having a Communications chair. The
ExCom also voted to get a price reduction quote for switching CF from
color to black and white. The ExCom then thoroughly discussed
Zander Collier's proposal that it should obtain business cards for each
member. I asked Angela Keaton how many times she's used her
business cards, and she answered that they've been very useful in
making it seem that the LP is not merely a hobby. Chuck Moulton
sensibly suggested that each member help the party by arranging to get
his own cards, but Kevin said that the cards should be consistent so
that we look like a team. It's not clear to me who is going to be
comparing the cards of ExCom members, except perhaps the prospective
donors that Cowles said should be double-teamed by card-wielding ExCom
duos.
Bruce Dovner and the two ExCom alternates Chuck Moulton and Jesse
Thomas were nominated to fill the three ExCom vacancies created by the
promotion of Newell and Cowles to officers and the resignation of M
Carling to allow serving on the Judicial Committee. The three
were elected without objection, as they were the top three vote-getters
among ExCom candidates who finished "out of the money" (as Dovner put
it). ExCom will fill the two alternate seats at a future meeting.
Incoming Treasurer Don Cowles reported that our fixed administrative
expenses are about $3500/month and that ExCom members will need to help
him fundraise. He urged everyone to contribute via the LPCA
Coffee Club.
Starchild arrived and made his signature attempt to move a chair up to
the Committee table from gallery seats along the wall. Moulton,
Brown and I wanted to explore an alternative to ordering him back to
the wall, but as Starchild inched his seat back in response to the
order, the episode devolved into farce, and Kevin got back to business
once Starchild was sufficiently far from the table.
Ted Brown and the remaining officers were nominated to join the Chair
on the Operating Committee. The secret ballot was Newell 12, Cain
11, Cowles 10, and Collier and Brown tied at 7. Travel plans
called Brown and Dovner away before the subsequent runoff won 6-4 by
Collier.
Cory Nott was chosen as the California rep to the national credentials
committee, with Cam McConnell made the alternate after Moulton
suggested the need for one. McConnell will also be the initial
coordinator for the 2008 LPCA convention. Dan Minkoff will be
taking over the reins of the Libertarian Perspective from Newell to
clear Rich's plate for his Northern Vice-Chair work.
Moulton requested the first of two or three time extensions to discuss
the 2008 convention cruise contract. It has a fixed $2500
cancellation penalty, and each ExCom member was given a chance to
express his opposition to floating conventions. Moulton's
objection centered on the need for a passport, but Dovner suggested
that the rule might be relaxed before the cruise. McConnell complained
that the 2006 cruise didn't have much in the way of speakers and didn't
allow communal LPCA dining, but conceded that may be different next
time. While Brown defended a convention cruise as better than no
convention at all, I said that I liked the 2006 cruise, heard more
guest speakers there (1) than I heard at the two 2007 lunches (0), and
favored any venue that (like a boat) could lock delegates in and
prevent a repeat of today's quorum problem. (McConnell himself
had earlier justifiably chided the absence from the Platform debate of
the incoming Chair, Southern Vice Chair, Treasurer, and
Secretary.) I also pointed out that this weekend's landlocked
convention had barely any more delegates than the cruise
convention. Rich then claimed that $5000 was spent to promote the
cruise compared to nothing for this weekend, but in the Mar 2007
P&L statement for 2006 I see $2355 in convention expenses and $3506
in convention revenue.
The ExCom passed resolutions thanking the convention committee and the
outgoing officers, and set the next ExCom meeting for Saturday June 9
in San Diego.
move ExCom appts up, add public comments to beginning, business cards
(Zander)
Zwickel: JudCom appeal of dues change. fiction of $30
subscription. withdraw JudCom complaint, new and more equitable dues
arrangement.
Aaron: prepared to defend ExCom before JudCom. 5.1.C. Help w/
conversion from MYOB to DonorPerfect and Quickbooks. Compile all home
addresses of all CA elected officials. County Coroner in Calavaras
County was a Lib, unknown to Tom Tryon
Angela: renewal mailing. 2% return rate. $55 dollar option
overwhelming. cofffee club mailing 2 weeks ago.
Ali Martin returned, is office mgr. Donor Perfect integration
with web site.
Brown: CF editor. Tom Cipos vice chair of LA applied.
Muffett too pricey, budget $800/mo total.
Aaron: Shane Corey new vendor for "LP News". maybe also do
CF. Ted: layout only? Chuck: co-package? separate
memberships, so no. Now: Walton Press in GA, which prints LP
News. Sipos was OK with prior $300/mo. Angela
could supervise, in lieu of a Communications Chair.
Muffett charges 750/issue.
Sipos to get 3-month trial at $300/mo.
Ted moves to limit layout to $500/mo.
Zander moved to make CF b/w. Aaron: cost is layout and postage,
color is marginally more, ~$600/mo
Barnes: substitute to get two quotes. Cowles only nay.
Zander: Jesse Thomas, Chuck Moulton, Ted: Dovner. No objection.
Zander: business cards
Mike McMahon: use Kinkos.
Holtz asked Angela how many times she's used cards. She says they're
useful in fundraising.
Moulton: donate costs of own card. Kevin: look like a team, be
consistent.
Kevin: coaltions, keep our promises
Zander: nothing yet
Rich: got GPS
Beau: nothing yet
Cowles: working with Aaron . $425/mo ED: $3K/mo
Need to fundraise. Distributed coffee club forms and sample
mug.
Starchild: Chuck, Ted, Brian
Carling: Bylaws: 1980 version was 3pp. Need to fix one
comma.
OpsCom: Dovner nominated Brown. 4 officers nominated.
Newell 12 Cain 11 Cowles 10 Collier 7 Brown 7.
Runoff: 6-4 Zander
Credentialing Cmte. Cory Nott. Cam McConnell alternate.
Committees.
Convention: contract signed. McConnell to start it up.
Media Relations. Dan Minkoff. SoCal bank comm director.
Barnes: style/branding committee
Moulton 8-3 to discuss convention cruise, he opposes due to
passport. Brown: had no other option. All else
opposed. Starchild opposed. Zwickel in favor. Carling in
favor. Westwell opposed and won't attend.
Resolutions: thank convention committee. thank outgoing committee.
Next: Sat June 9, San Diego