Insider

Listening to the pundits on the Friday afternoon talk show, I discovered who I was.  As delegate to the Democratic convention, I am automatically an apparatchik, a hack, an insider, someone who's been wooed and won, not in the least representative of voters, who are not anything like me, who are people for whom politics is just the product to be stamped with approval.

They'll be four of us going tomorrow, and I bet none of us, not one, smoke cigars. Oh, I'm playing with cliche's here but sometimes the lofty disinterest of the opineophiles, their weakness for lapsing into disdain for the hugger-mugger of politics, exasperates me. I'm not a campaign manager, a deal maker, a strategist, just a foot soldier (of sorts) who thinks politicians and policy need advocates among the public--and I intend to one such.

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Just home from the Friday session opening the convention, having missed the formal presentations (mostly kudos for the governor) but not the groups of delegates milling around the convention center and making their way gradually to the various candidate sponsored parties in nearby eateries and hotels. Just looking at the delegate mix, there seemed to be substantial ethnic and gender diversity, that is, African-American people and women, and particularly black women. As to age, there seemed to be grey-heads and youngsters (late teens and twenties) and not much in between. There were the standard operative types who were trading information and shmoozing.

But mostly the crowd was people in twos and threes excited about meeting each other again. Even at the parties, it was more like old home week than delegate button-holing. Perhaps that's tomorrow. 'I wandered lonely as a cloud,' pretty standard for me, stopping to just look, or most often, let a stream of delegate traffic one day abate enough to allow me to go the other. A young girl addressed me, and I queried her about the reasons for her support for her candidate, but to her relief, somebody turned on the mic and said something, and the conversation ceased.

Tomorrow, I will have made decisions that will affected the futures of several of these candidates, but I'm committed to only one. What about the rest?  Yori's been assembling info and maybe we'll talk in the car. And there will be speeches, 10 minutes per candidate.

On the way home, I began listening to an audio lecture series on modern China which over and over pointed to the paradox of free economic activity and tight political control in that country. The average level of hope in the future in China, the lecturer said, is higher than in the United States. What we're doing tomorrow out in Worcester is exactly what doesn't happen in Beijing. If this is 'democracy church', will the''glory fill the temple'? More to the point, will we govern ourselves well?