Speakers Fire Up Democrats’ Convention

Fiery speeches from two unlikely sources--an aging union chief and a former governor who used to scorn party pols--roused a somnolent California Democratic Party convention Sunday into a hand-clapping revival of its old coalition of liberals, labor unions and minorities.

Convention delegates were brought to their feet time and again during the concluding session by challenges from veteran state AFL-CIO leader John F. Henning and former Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr. to organize a reversal of the 1994 election drubbing by Republicans.

Both Henning and Brown said the party must have two major goals in 1996: to unite behind a labor-sponsored ballot initiative to raise the state minimum wage, and to join in opposition to a Republican-backed measure to repeal state affirmative action laws.

The silver-haired Henning, who is 80 and on the eve of retirement after three decades as the head of the California Labor Federation, was especially disdainful of the increasingly conservative policies of Gov. Pete Wilson and Republicans who control the Assembly.

Henning accused them of following the “chain-gang philosophy of the Old South” and declared in a raspy, stentorian voice: “Governor, California is not Alabama!”

About 1,500 delegates and guests at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel erupted into applause and cheers.

Then Henning said, “We trust, and we pray, and indeed we know that when that issue is on the ballot in November, union members will be voting not only for that increase in the minimum wage, but they will be voting for the renaissance of the Democratic Party in California.”

The initiative measure, which is expected to qualify soon for the Nov. 5 ballot, would raise the current minimum wage--which Henning indignantly called the “poverty” wage--from $4.25 an hour to $5.75 in two steps.

Jerry Brown appeared along with his sister, former state Treasurer Kathleen Brown, and their mother, Bernice Brown, as part of a tribute to former Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Sr., who died Feb. 16 at 90.

Jerry Brown likened the current political situation in California to his father’s tenure as governor, from 1959-67, when the two parties were highly polarized over issues of race and economic class.

In 1958, he said, Republicans sought to keep their grip on the governorship by sponsoring a right-to-work ballot initiative that would have banned the closed or union shop in the state. But Democrats and candidate Pat Brown, allied with organized labor, defeated the ballot measure, and the GOP suffered perhaps its worst election debacle in modern California history.

In Brown’s second term, he and the Democrats passed the Rumford Act of 1963, which sought to ban discrimination in the sale of housing. The next year, Republicans sponsored a 1964 ballot measure to repeal the law.

“So we are still fighting about race,” Jerry Brown said. “We are still fighting about discrimination and the right of everyone in this state to be treated fairly. So the tradition of my father is still very much alive.”

The delegates also gave Brown a standing, cheering ovation although he was cool--and sometimes outright scornful--to party functionaries when he was governor from 1975-83. And Brown, 58, never was a favorite of many party liberals because of his conservative fiscal policies and skepticism about additional social programs.

More recently, relations between Kathleen Brown and organized labor became strained during her unsuccessful campaign for governor in 1994. Early on, she appeared to endorse the North American Free Trade Agreement, then attempted to mute her support when labor protested heatedly.

Until Sunday morning, the convention was going just the way state party leaders had planned it: routine, on schedule and devoid of the intraparty fighting over issues that has marked so many party meetings in the past.

The idea was to keep the delegates and other activists, numbering up to 2,500 during Saturday sessions, focused primarily on the reelection campaign of President Bill Clinton in November.

That changed Sunday with the appearances of Henning and the Browns.

Also, the new state party chairman, Art Torres of Los Angeles, used the convention to energize the alliance between Democrats and Latinos. Torres, 49, is a longtime Latino activist and former aide to the late United Farm Workers Union leader Cesar Chavez.

Torres, a former assemblyman and state senator, gave prominent convention exposure to state Sen. Richard G. Polanco (D-Los Angeles), the chairman of the Latino Legislative Caucus, and other members of the growing Latino corps in the Legislature.