Dear Members, Supporters, and Other Readers,
This is my last message as Club President. The February newsletter will carry one from the President-Elect, who will be chosen at our January 8 General Meeting.
It has been an honor to have been entrusted with the city’s oldest, largest, and most respected political organization. Over the last four years we have significantly improved how we work and expanded our programming, legislative work, and endorsements.
Despite left-wing alienation from the Democratic Party and the emergence of right-wing “blue wave” “unity” Democratic Clubs funded by billionaires like Rick Caruso and Michael Hackman, our membership is higher than when I was first elected. We’ve also increasingly moved to handling membership online, with payments through ActBlue and records kept on a shared spreadsheet. When I came in, payment was mainly by check and records kept on paper.
Similarly, we have moved our meetings to Zoom, which saves us thousands of dollars on room rentals annually. It also enables more people to participate and, for programs, makes it possible both to bring together speakers from multiple out-of-town locations and to make and share recordings.
Using Election Buddy online rather than paper ballots at in-person meetings has made our endorsement process more democratic. Every member now can vote, not just those who could attend an in-person meeting.
We got a debit card. Now we can pay for things online directly, rather than reimbursing officers for the use of their personal credit cards, and nearly all our transactions are in a single bank statement. Our bookkeeping no longer involves a box of receipts. We have changed Treasurers and financial consultants and deleted ex-members from our business license.
In the summer of 2022 the Fiesta La Ballona Committee and the City Council were considering getting rid of all political booths at Fiesta, possibly even all nonprofit booths, because they believed there was no other way to keep the NRA from coming and creeping everyone out, even though the NRA had consistently breached their contract by not staffing their booth for the required times and hours. I was the only representative of a Culver City-based political group to address the Fiesta Committee and also wrote to the City Council on this matter. The outcome was the survival of the status quo: this year’s NRA booth featured a “Women for Gun Safety” banner above a table staffed by angry-looking clipboard-bearing men in trucker hats and camo vests. Meanwhile, our booth was full of Club Members, elected officials, endorsed candidates, and interested attendees, laughing as we discussed our hopes and goals for the election and our community. For several years I also invited the local Sierra Club chapter, West LA for Black Lives, and other allied groups who did not have booths of their own to share our platform. I started our Fiesta La Ballona pop-up Little Free Library, which attracted people to the booth and gave away hundreds of used books, mostly on political/cultural/social issues, and I worked with Karim Sahli to replace our aging banner with a new table cover and step-and-repeat. The Club Board has approved some new activities and merchandise I proposed for our 2025 booth; stay tuned.
I was very happy to lead this Club in becoming a founding partner in the Culver Pride celebration. Homophobia was ubiquitous when I grew up here in the 1970s and 1980s. More recently Karlo Silbiger and Kathy Paspalis endured shocking abuse as the first openly LGBTQ+ School Board Members, but seeing teachers march with rainbow flags in the City’s 2017 centennial parade, the launch of Pride, and Freddy Puza and Bubba Fish’s victories in the last two City Council elections has given me hope that things have changed.
When I first met Representative Sydney Kamlager, she was our State Assembly Member and I had just been elected a delegate to the State Democratic Party as part of the Forward 54 progressive slate organized by former Club President Tom Camarella. She was skeptical that the slate represented Culver City, because the calls and emails her office received from Culver residents were overwhelmingly conservative. I mentioned this in my second President’s Message, in March 2021. Since then, our work on State legislation has increased several times over. Thanks to Legislative Chair Leah Pressman, we are covering dozens of bills each year and updating our comments at each step of the bills’ odyssey through the system. Leah has also coordinated this work with the Santa Monica Democratic Club’s Legislative Committee, creating a progressive grassroots lobbying network for the westside. Our current Assembly Member and fellow Club Member Isaac Bryan has reported that his colleagues have noticed. We have changed how Sacramento sees
Culver City.
That progressive delegate slate, run in 2018 by Tom Camarella, in 2020 by Greg Bartlett and Elina Antoniou, and in 2022 by Greg Bartlett and Leah Pressman, was endorsed each time by this Club. It has swept the last three elections with a single exception. One seat got away from us in 2018; it went to a UCLA grad student named Isaac Bryan. In 2022 we defeated a conservative slate which included then-Mayor Albert Vera Jr. Since this is an internal party election, not a public one, election laws don’t apply. Vera’s slate offered voters free sandwiches from his father’s deli in exchange for their votes, but they failed to buy a single seat.
State Party conventions are largely theatrical spectacles, with the elected delegates there to provide a populist facade for a structure built and run by and for corporate interests, but they are also excellent networking events. During my tenure as President, Leah and I have brought Party leaders from across the state to this Club, including Progressive Caucus Chairs Amar Singh Shergill and Fatima Iqbal-Zubair, Environmental Caucus Chairs RL Miller and Igor Tregub, Renters Council Officer and Berkeley Rent Board Member Alfred Twu, DNC Member Matthew Hilliard, State Party Vice Chair Betty Yee, and others.
Moving our meetings online made it easy to present a wide range of activists and experts, including Ryan Skolnick of the California Nurses Association, Brian Fragne of the Sierra Club, Keren Sookne of Citizens Climate Lobby, Tom Latkowski and Mike Draskovic from Los Angeles for Democracy Vouchers, and Tony Tolbert and Adam Radzinski of the Pay the Tab podcast. UCLA Law Professor Joanna Schwartz discussed her book Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable and University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Professor Yvette Lindgren spoke on abortion law after the Dobbs decision. I’ve booked one more progressive legal star: Alec Karakatsanis, author of Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System and The Body Camera (available free online here), will discuss his forthcoming book Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News at our April 2025 meeting.
I am especially proud of two aspects of our programming. First, we have explored intersections of politics and culture. We organized a program on last year’s entertainment union strikes with Club Members Pete Rockwell (SAG) and Patrick Meighan (WGA) joined by State Senator Lola Smallwood-Cuevas and one on local media with journalists from the Culver City News, Westside Voice, and Culver City Crossroads. Last month’s presentation was from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, based in Culver City, and we have collaborated on fundraisers with the Actors Gang, Village Well Books and Coffee, One Person, One Vote? and Brave New Films.
Second, while every organization was passing resolutions and putting up signs in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, we were the only group in Culver City to actually bring speakers from that movement to this community. We hosted Baba Greg Akili of BLM-LA in February 2021 and had representatives of West LA for Black Lives as featured guests in our booth at Fiesta La Ballona.
As online campaigning has become increasingly important, due to the pandemic, the rise of social media, and other factors, our programs and endorsements have become more related. In both election cycles during my Presidency, we created YouTube videos with dozens of candidates. I spoke with every candidate for LA County Sheriff except Alex Villanueva. It was one of the stranger experiences of my life. I asked almost all of them how they planned to approach running the world’s largest mental health facility (the LA County Jail holds more people with psychiatric issues than any other institution) and it was clear from their answers that none had previously considered that aspect of the jail. At least one candidate described in detail the circumstances in which they had killed someone in the line of duty. That was definitely not something I had expected to hear as a Democratic Club President.
Our videos with the judicial candidates were the most popular, probably because few if any other organizations covered these candidates. I was very proud that several voter guides linked to our videos. These are the most popular items on our YouTube channel, with one getting over 8500 views.
We endorsed Karen Bass for Mayor of Los Angeles in 2022, even though she would not appear on the ballot in Culver City, because she had served as our State and Federal legislator and we felt that qualified and obligated us to give her our recommendation. We have since endorsed other non-Culver City ballot candidates, including Erin Darling, Jillian Burgos, Heather Hutt, and Ysabel Jurado for LA City Council and Sade Elhawary for State Assembly. While this Club is not chartered as a progressive group unlike, for example, the Feel the Bern Democratic Club, our members have consistently voted to support candidates, ballot measures, and legislation on the left of the Democratic Party. We know that Culver City is not an island, so our success requires sympathetic leadership in LA, and that our State representatives need good allies.
I know that I was elected President of this Club because of my work as an advocate on issues including saving the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum, bringing rent control and renter protections to Culver City and, most of all, rethinking the role of policing. When I took office in February 2021, I said I was not going to run the Club as an activist: that I would be a neutral moderator, not use my role as Chair to influence the outcomes of discussions and votes, and not take advantage of my position to occupy extra space in debates during meetings. Vice Mayor Daniel Lee was concerned that this meant I would be doing less activism overall. I do not think this has happened, and that I have succeeded in running meetings impartially. If the Club has been a consistently progressive voice, that’s because of you, not me.
Credit is also due to all those who served as officers these past four years: Tom Camarella, Eric Fine, Jeanna Harris, Cynthia Hart, Will Herrera, Haifaa Moammar, Leah Pressman, Freddy Puza, Pete Rockwell, Diane Rosenberg, and Shannon Theus, to the Nominating Committee members who have recruited and retained this team, to Tad Daley, Susan Obrow, and Ronnie Jayne Solomon for their work organizing our social and fundraising events, to Karim Sahli for his technical and design assistance, and especially to the members who have volunteered to stand for election or reelection as officers at our upcoming meeting. Our work continues!