I was given the Camejo sticker on July 23, 2002 in the parking lot at the Adobe Building in Mountain View.

Last night the Santa Clara County Green Party got together here in Mountain View at the Adobe Building to listen to Peter Camejo and an assortment of other Green Party Candidates explain why we should vote for them. There must have been 200 people in the room by the time our headliner took the stage. Not only did we have a good audience in the seats, but we had good munchies for them, a good sound system and lots of ideas worth absorbing in the program.

Our first speaker was Warner Bloomberg, who explained that he is running for State Assembly because the deck is stacked against new voices in too many ways. The issue that makes him the most furious is the two party duopoly's redistricting, which basically sliced up every community into "safe seats" for either Republicans or Democrats. He pointed to the Berryessa neighborhood as a case in point, right in his own back yard. The Asian Community that had traditionally been in one district had been quartered when the maps were redrawn, "improving" the demographic profiles of four districts and diluting the communities voice. He called that "political opportunism", and said that we need to put redistricting in the hands of a new elected board that is independent of the incumbents. He finished by saying "The Green Party is needed to protect democracy by challenging the power grabbers that inhabit the two dominant parties. If you believe democracy is important and precious, support our candidates!"

Then came Jo Chamberlain, who is running in the 19th District. She talked about the National Green Party Meeting in Philadelphia, which she attended because she is one of five co-chairs of the United States Green Party. The good news was that five more States joined the Party at that meeting, bringing the total number of Green Parties in the US to 39. She talked about some of the dynamics of "proportional representation" at that meeting, where California has twelve seats out of 79. She said that is "very fair" even though California has something like three quarters of the registered Green Party Members in the country living in our State. Then she gave a brief rundown on her own campaign, which is going very well.

After that there was a procession of statewide candidates. David Sheidlower, our candidate for Insurance Commissioner, talked about the need for single payer health insurance. Laura Wells, our candidate for Controller, talked about the need for more accountability in the way the State spends our money. Larry Shoup, our candidate for Secretary of State, talked about the need for Corporate Charter Reform. All were given a warm welcome by the crowd, and all rose to the occasion.

Peter Camejo followed a ten minute break. As well as covering all the points I have heard in his other stump speeches, he gave us an update on how his campaign is going well. Davis has been pulling strings too keep newspapers and TV stations from publishing information about his campaign, and people are telling Camejo about it and then rebelling by putting him on the air. The "email wars" are going quite well. He told the story of the San Francisco Chronicle editorializing about how awful the choice between Davis and Simon is, and wailing that there was no other choice. The word had gone out on Green Party email lists to point out to them that Camejo was on the ballot, and two days later the Chronicle had apologized for not mentioning him in the article. He encouraged us to participate in this kind of activism, because it feels so good when it works.

We closed out the program by raising what looked like thousands of dollars for the campaigns of the candidates that showed up. After it was over, for quite a while there were lots of people chatting up a storm. I was surprised to find out that one of them was Sally Leiber, the Mayor of Mountain View. When I told her we were honored by her presence, she looked around the room at all the happy people and told me "Mountain View has not historically been known as a hotbed of political activism."

Tian Harter

7/24/2002