From Poker to Politics

 

 

Part 4: THE DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM

 

Every two years, the Michigan Democratic Party puts up a new platform for the fall elections. I like working on rules sets, and had offered my services for 2008 in the summer of 2007. At the beginning of May, 2008, I was notified that I was on the Platform Committee. Our first meeting was by teleconference with Party Chair Mark Brewer. It turned out that there were only four of us on the committee. We had about three weeks to do the job of rewriting the 2006 Platform, which would then be turned in for revision and approval to the party’s Central Committee.

 

To my amazement, it turned out that I was the most experienced person on platform writing, in view of the small amount of experience I had in 2006 working on the county resolutions. One other fellow had worked on the county resolutions in 2004, but not in 2006. Both of the ladies had not done platform writing before, though they were experienced political people and members of the state Central Committee.

 

After our teleconference, I contacted the other members of the committee, and we discussed how to go forward. Someone had to maintain the master document and keep track of all the changes. I was asked to do that, and accepted. One of the ladies found herself too busy with other things to do any work. The other man on our committee was not computer literate, and did his work in handwritten notes; yuk. However, he was a retired college English teacher, and politically knowledgeable, so I did the work of translating his nearly undecipherable handwriting into digital form.

 

The bulk of the work on the document was done by myself and Jennie Needleman of Ann Arbor. Jennie had both excellent editing skills and fine political savvy. She was a pleasure to work with. We had an unwritten agreement that if either of us was unhappy with any section or wording, we would keep doing it over and over until we both liked it. There was no part of the final document that either of us was unhappy about.

 

There was plenty of poorly written parts to the 2006 document that needed to be reworked. We had more or less a free hand in turning it into good writing. The policy stuff was closely monitored by Mark Brewer, but we still played a role by making suggestions for possible additions.

 

My pet project was putting a financial services section into the platform. The 2006 document had nothing on the subject, and this was fast developing into the biggest issue of the 2008 election. I took a lot of ideas from the New York Times articles and editorials. I took a number of appealing ideas put forward by Bush’s Treasury Secretary Hank Paulsen, figuring any tighter regulations he supported should be especially important, since the GOP is not known for favoring close financial oversight. And I used a half-dozen suggestions advanced by Senator Carl Levin in one of his press releases.

 

Another thing we did is to sort all the policy ideas by category. Only in this way could we give the platform a proper Table of Contents. Jennie and I were very

satisfied with our work. Brewer not only was appreciative of the end result, but also of the fact that we got done in only two weeks and used up less of his time than he

had allocated for the project.

 

After we completed the document, I was invited to visit Jennie and her husband Richard for dinner at their home in Ann Arbor. Richard worked at Wayne State University and had a doctorate in micro-biology. Turns out we all had a Brooklyn background, and the Needlemans were familiar with the Oceanside, Long Island area where I had attended elementary school.

 

One of Jennie’s and my little inside jokes was, “The platform couldn’t be all that important, or they wouldn’t have given the job to us.” On paper, we were inexperienced and probably should not have been given the project. But the reality is the Michigan Democratic Party got lucky, now having a document that is a first-rate piece of writing which is also properly organized. You can view it at the party’s website www.michigandems.com.