Trotting out credentials

Candidates make pitch to liberal Democratic group

Perhaps its endorsements don’t carry the same luster they once did, when 6,000 delegates flocked to the California Democratic Council’s conventions during its anti-Vietnam War heyday, but the fire and passion for Democratic causes and grass-roots efforts are still there.

About 120 of the council’s delegates gathered Saturday at the Radisson Hotel in San Jose to iron out the organization’s positions on the ballot propositions and to listen to 40 candidates ask for support from the state Democratic Party’s old liberal wing.

There was Leslie J. Cochren, running for a seat in the Assembly from Sacramento, pounding the podium and demanding justice for vocational school students who are about to lose the regulatory agency that advocates on their behalf.

There, too, was Santa Clara County Supervisor Mike Honda calling Proposition 227, which would ban bilingual instruction in schools, “the most devious, un-American proposition anyone ever visited on our children. I’m not going to let it happen!”

“My mother collected ‘Dollars for Democrats.’ My father was a truck driver,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San Jose. “But I was able to get an education and go on to Congress. That’s what the Democratic Party stands for: hope and opportunity.”

Two of the three Democratic candidates for governor, Al Checchi and Jane Harman, skipped the gathering Saturday, but Lt. Gov. Gray Davis, who leads in the polls, attended. Davis told delegates he hoped his pitch for their support would go better than the one he threw out last year before a San Francisco Giants-Oakland A’s baseball game.

“It hit the plate,” he said, “and I told my aide that probably nobody noticed because the catcher scooped it up quickly. But he told me they not only noticed, they re-ran the pitch three times on the giant television screen.”

Davis, who hopes to end a 16-year reign of Republican governors in California, said he will also work to end what he called the divisive attack by the Republicans “on people who have different names or skin color.”

Davis said some of his other concerns for California include improving public schools, clean air and water, a woman’s right to choose relative to abortion, and making a college education more affordable.



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