More Convention Coverage

A few more thoughts on the State Convention:

Thanks to Caleb, Nate and Heather at RPI. It’s no trade secret that the Democrats have a far larger full time staff, and have for at least the last five years. These three young staffers can make up a lot of the ground with superior quality of performance. Having seen Wes Peterson provide our spending public with a degree of enthusiasm and sense of welcome that our events have lacked (except during Eric Branstad’s all together too brief employment at RPI) for the last several years, it looks like we might have found a fundraiser for a new generation.

Thanks to all of the Polk County delegates who turned out and well represented our County. Very special thanks to Kohlzy, The Spice Girl, Barbie and the whole Polk County Credentials committee that showed up and took care of the credential process for the Third District on Friday night. This group did a great job of moving the process along. We in the Third had almost everyone seated by eight o’clock and we were able to get started at 8:04. Gopal moved the Friday caucus efficiently. Third District was the first to finish and Second District was the last, about three hours apart, on Friday night. Of course, biggest thanks of all to Sarah Cutshall and Sarah Bowman (E.D. and CoChair) for preparing our delegate areas, getting and keeping our voting process organized. Sarah Bowman showed a lot of floor leadership and efficiency in getting and keeping our votes counted.

As an aside, the only error that occurred in counting the Polk vote was involved a teller’s inadvertent inclusion of some Poweshiek and Tama county votes that were immediately corrected. As for significance, even had the counting error gone uncorrected it would have remained harmless as the motion was defeated by a margin of more than three to one.

Thanks to Jon Gruber, Norm Pawlewski and our Polk County Platform Committee. Our Polk County group put together a Platform that has been adopted in toto by other counties in the United States. It looked like our County Platform formed the basis of the State Platform. Jon Gruber put together a procedure for beginning the platform debate at the Caucuses in January for the County and our State Platform Committee ended the process with a document around which we have to unify-it is our public declaration of values and goals. The platform committee is hard duty and our people have given us a very traditionally Republican platform. Now let’s get out and explain and defend it rather than allowing the liberal press to misstate and caricaturize it.

We also elected Iowa’s representatives for the National Convention Standing Committees and the leaders of our delegation. Those selections are:

Chair: Steve Scheffler

Co Chair: David Roderer

Rules: Steve Roberts, Sandy Greiner

Credentials: Steve Scheffler, Katherine Koburg

Platform: David Chung, Lisa Smith

Permanent Organization: Virgeene Donavon, Loras Schulte

Like the larger delegation, the distribution of the committee and leadership positions bespeaks party unity and camaraderie, which provides a good note on which to close.