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Health & Fitness

Preparing for the 2012 Democratic National Convention

Jeffrey Adair, native of Redwood City makes plans to attend the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, NC.

Hi Everyone! My name is Jeffrey Adair and I am a native and resident of Redwood City and a business owner in Menlo Park.

I have been an elected delegate for the California Democratic Party representing Assembly District 21 (Rich Gordon) for two terms. After redistricting, I now live in the new Assembly District 22, which I hope to see Kevin Mullin elected to be our representative.  

As I prepare to attend the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, September 4-7…. a lot of people have asked about the selection process and becoming more involved in party politics on a local level…here’s some answers:

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I was elected as a District Level Delegate on April 29th, 2012 in Los Altos by registered democrats residing in the new realigned Congressional District 18 (Anna Eshoo), which includes parts of San Mateo, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties.

Each Congressional District is allotted delegates according to demographics for each district. Our district had spots for 5 women and 4 men with one male alternate. There were thousands of candidates statewide running for 547 seats. WE had over 25 candidates for our 9 positions.

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I placed third in the vote count for the men. I ran on a slate of fellow democrats…3 women and 3 men…all but one of us was elected. We represented a broad diversity of our district encompassing women activists, young democrats, persons of color, LGBT community, environmental activists, unions and civil servants.

After the June 4th primary, we were approved by the Obama campaign as delegates.

In other years, where there is more than one democratic candidate, we would have had pledged to the candidate of our choice and been allocated to that candidate for the National Convention. This year, there is only the one…and the best!

On June 24th, we gathered in Sacramento with the other 365 elected delegates to vote approval of the AT LARGE delegates  ( selected by Obama campaign from applicants) and the PLEO (Party Leader Elected Official… members of the Democratic National Committee, elected State, Regional, Federal officials, and of course the Governor). They were all approved unanimously and join us to create the largest state delegation attending the convention. 610!!!

There are 547 pledged delegates to President Obama and 63 “unpledged”…these are 27 Democratic National Committee members, 36 members of Congress and Senators.

The governor also attends! They will pledge their votes to the President AT the convention.

There are TWO of us going to the convention from Redwood City…I’m joined by the mayor, Alicia Aguirre!

On a parallel track, I ran for office in this last election cycle to be a member of the Democratic Central Committee (DCC, the governing board of the democratic party in San Mateo County).

I was one of four candidates for the four seats in County Supervisor District Four…Because we were unopposed, our names did not appear on the ballot and we were appointed to our positions. We were officially sworn into office on July 19, 2012.  

We hold our DCC meeting monthly on the THIRD THURSDAYS at 7:30pm in Belmont at the San Mateo Party Headquarters… 650 El Camino Real across from the train station.

You’ll hear more from me in the coming weeks as we get closer to Charlotte 2012. I’ll be blogging AT the convention as well and sending you video and photos from all my activites.

Cheers! Here’s to Obama 2012!!

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