ELECTIONS '08

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Timm Herdt blogs on politics and Ventura County in a presidential election year.
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SAN JOSE — California Democrats gathered this weekend with the uneasy confidence of a sailor who senses a wind at his back but who also must keep watch on a widening rip in his sail.

"I think we will do really well if we don't kill ourselves," said Ventura County Democratic Central Committee Chairman Bill Gallaher. "I hold my breath day to day."

At a convention that was originally conceived to be a rallying point for a campaign to take back the White House, Democrats remain split between supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and backers of Sen. Barack Obama. There is growing worry, even among the blue-dog loyalists who attend a state convention, that if the nomination fight remains unsettled through the summer it could yield failure in the fall.

"If we don't start to ratchet down the rhetoric, the only people who are going to benefit are Republicans," said Assemblyman Pedro Nava, the Santa Barbara Democrat whose district includes Ventura and much of Oxnard. "We need to have a civil, courteous dialogue."

Search for a candidate

Nava was an early supporter of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and has not taken sides in the Clinton-Obama split since Edwards dropped out of the presidential race. He said he hopes that Edwards, in conjunction with perhaps Al Gore, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other prominent uncommitted Democrats, can help to negotiate a party-unifying decision after the last primaries.

The consensus among activists is that all will still turn out well if a winner emerges shortly after a grueling, five-month string of state primaries is wrapped up in June.

State Chairman Art Torres said Democrats should patiently allow the "natural course of events" to play out. "I am not worried today," he said. "If we don't get something resolved by the convention, then I get more concerned. We realize that we could very well lose this election if we don't get our act together."

The national party convention, to be held in Denver, will take place the last week in August.

But while Torres and others attempt this weekend to play the role of peacemakers, partisans for Obama and Clinton are using the convention to appeal to the state's 21 uncommitted superdelegates — part of a nationwide bloc of about 350 still-neutral delegates who could put one candidate over the top in the near-certain event that neither ends the primary season with a majority of the party's pledged delegates.

Former President Bill Clinton is scheduled to speak to the convention on behalf of his wife this morning and also meet privately with a handful of uncommitted superdelegates. Torres said a similar invitation was extended to Obama, but the Illinois senator's campaign has not dispatched a high-level surrogate to California.

That has left Obama's in-state campaign leaders to pick up his cause.

Former Controller Steve Westly, co-chair of Obama's California campaign, said the stage is set for Obama to clinch the nomination shortly after the North Carolina and Indiana primaries on May 6.

"I don't expect a lot to happen in the next three to four weeks," Westly said. "Then you'll see a steady drumbeat. I think you will see an extraordinary surge of superdelegates going to Obama."

He noted that just on Friday Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy publicly suggested Clinton should drop out and Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey made a surprise endorsement of Obama.

Westly said those developments are evidence that the party's nomination system, in which party officials and members of Congress are empowered as unpledged delegates who can break a deadlock, "actually works." In the end, he predicted, they will move en masse to the candidate with the most popular votes and delegates — who at this point is Obama.

"That's the whole point," he said. "This is what is supposed to happen."

Superdelegate Robert Rankin of Carson, a state party official, said he intends to make a decision only after the remaining 10 states have voted. "I feel they need to be heard," he said. "I would not want the process to prematurely end."

After that, he predicted, "We'll be done in June."

Democrats take majority

Even as they fret over the nomination battle, state Democrats are tending to other tasks this weekend. Among them is toasting the two dozen delegates from Ventura County, who for the first time in more than two decades are representing a county in which Democrats constitute a plurality of registered voters.

Democrats surpassed Republicans in voter registration in early March, and the most recent figures show they have expanded their lead. As of last week, the Democratic registration edge had grown to 3,007 — up from a 479-voter advantage three weeks earlier.

"We're very happy that since the last convention, the county of Ventura has turned blue," Torres noted in his convention-opening remarks to reporters on Friday.

County Democrats are discovering that with growth come growing pains. At a contentious endorsement caucus Saturday afternoon, supporters of 37th Assembly District candidate David Hare of Camarillo successfully blocked a local pre-convention recommendation that the party endorse Newbury Park schoolteacher Ferial Masry.

Masry, who was the party's nominee in 2004 and 2006, fell just short of the 60 percent threshold needed to secure an endorsement. That means that the party cannot contribute money to either candidate or mention a preferred candidate on mailers sent to Democratic voters.