Unity Coalition to Host Public Meeting for WA Dem Chair Candidates

"The Candidate Forum will be held on Sunday, January 8th at 2:00 at the Carpenters Hall Local 1797 at 231 Burnett Ave. North in Renton and interested Democrats are welcome to attend.
A Unity Coalition of several different Party caucuses, including the African American, Agriculture Rural, Asian Pacific, Disability, Federation of Democratic Women, Hispanic/Latino, Jewish, Labor, Progressive, Stonewall, Veterans and Young Democratic caucuses, is planning to hold a Candidate’s forum and try to get the people running for Chair to come and talk with the Coalition and answer some questions.

“I wanted someone I could trust,” said Luis Moscoso, the organizer of the event and the State Secretary of the Washington State Democrats.

I had the opportunity to sit and talk with Luis and several other folks after a meeting last week and hear about the Unity Coalition he is trying to build quickly to exert some impact on the recently announced upcoming election for Party Chair, created unexpectedly by Paul Berendt’s announcement that he’d be stepping down. One of the folks at the table, Noemie Maxwell, had recently written an interesting posting on this Unity Coalition that Luis was putting together to have an impact on selecting the new Chair. We all wanted to hear more.

Luis was elected last January by a pretty wide margin for someone who knew at most five people out of the 178 people voting prior to the election. He says he thinks they were ready for some change on some part of the ticket and they liked his message. State Secretary is an unpaid position and there has not been a lot of call for him to do much. So he’s getting to create what he wants in the position and has chosen to focus on strengthening the various Party caucuses and building coalitions between them.

Luis realized quickly that he didn’t really like the process used in the elections and wanted to see if he could make some changes in the next election cycle. Well, a piece of that election arrived early. So he went into action.

His idea is that the caucuses that participate in the forum will not endorse any particular candidate. They will talk about what they want the new Chair to do and they will ask a series of questions to each of the candidates. The questions will have to do with internal Party protocols as well as specific issues."-from Lynn Allen on Evergreen Politics.