In case you’re new, I’m a delegate to the Iowa State Republican Convention this year. And it is today.
So far we’ve had an interesting day. I thought for sure we were in for a long haul after the extended time spent on the report from the Rules Committee. One of the rules basically said that we would not have nominations from the floor for at-large delegates to the National Convention. The fact is, there is a mechanism for the convention to change the names of the delegates by requesting amendments to the Nominating Committee report. But before that became clear to the convention, we had already a motion to delete the rule, which led to a voice vote that was not 100% clear, and so a headcount (division) was requested which ended up taking over 30 minutes to conduct. The motion failed. Then we found out about the option to amend the Nominating committee report.
The thing that concerned me is that people were already getting somewhat emotional about this issue. I envisioned all kinds of stress through the whole convention.
The good news is, by the time we broke for lunch, we heard from a bunch of the speakers, voted for the National Committee Man and Woman (still waiting for the results), and we have 3 or 4 more speeches, the Nominating Committee Report, and the Platform remaining. Of course, the Platform will still likely take a long time to get through. I have hopes for being done by 5:00 PM (it’s 1:50 PM right now), but we’ll see.
I had the pleasure of meeting Chris Sanger, who is running for the Iowa House [1] in District 62 (south side of Des Moines). He has a tough race ahead as his district has been traditionally Democrat, but as I’ve said before, we need to take the fight to every district, every position… we need to work to get our message out and support our candidates wherever they may be.
I also wandered by a few booths that have some information I think might be useful here at The Conservative Reader. Hopefully, more in the near future.
Mike Huckabee gave an excellent speech with a very strong conservative agenda, warmly received, and highly supportive of John McCain. Great push for party unity. 2012 or 2016 may look really good for Mike.
And as the afternoon session starts, we have the announcement that Steve Sheffler and Kim Lehman have won the National Committee Man and Woman. Good people these are and I think they will serve Iowa well.