This Santa Barbara County
Jefferson-Jackson Dinner was held Saturday, 23 February 2008, at
Earl Warren Showgrounds (Warren Hall) in Santa Barbara. Jefferson-Jackson Dinners are annual events and celebrations by Democratic groups nationwide, commemorating some of the founders of the Democratic Party.
The crowd was approximately 450 for this sold-out, capacity-filling event, drawing Democrats from throughout Santa Barbara County and some of their DTS friends. A few Obamicans might have slipped in too. The event was primarily organized by
Barbie Deutsch and
Ellen Dana Nagler, a
duo of Democrat dynamos who run the local political action organization
BE for Change. The local, formal arm of the Democratic Party is
Santa Barbara County Democratic Central Committee, with local Dem activities noted at the
Dem Central website.
The keynote speaker at this
Jefferson-Jackson Dinner was
John Dean, famous White House Counsel who sang to the Senate about the Nixon Watergate scandal. Most of this 28-minute video features remarks by Dean, who puts current Presidential politics in perspective about Republican nominee
John McCain and his history with Republican stalwart
Barry Goldwater. A prodigious author about the corrupt and incompetent Mess of the
GW Bush administration, John Dean further speaks about how national politics in Washington really work, or not, for democracy, with grave implications for the Nov. 2008 Presidential election. Some of Dean's recent books are
Broken Government,
Blind Ambition,
Worse than Watergate,
Pure Goldwater, and
Conservatives without Conscience. His latest book, of course, was for sale at the event.
Other speakers and musical performers at this
2008 Santa Barbara Jefferson-Jackson Dinner included
Sam Negrao on gentle guitar,
Carol Ann Manzi (soprano) and
Thomas Heck (classic guitar) performing
America the Beautiful, singer-songeditor
Marian Shapiro, and
Henry Vandermeir of
California Democratic Council with a Statewide perspective for this election season. The
Selma Rubin Outstanding Grassroots Activist Awards --presented by
Selma herself-- were bestowed to
Santa Maria Valley Democratic Club and
Jill and Mark Brouillard of Fresco! restaurant.
Technical Note: Yep, the audio is out of sync for the remarks by
John Dean. For the wide views, though, it does not look too bad, especially with the other video of the event and still pictures overlaid. OLPA co-producer
David Pritchett erred
Big Time in setting the transmitter level too high for the wireless microphone, so the audio linked with the video was way, way
over-modulated and unusable. The audio file used in this final production actually was from a separate recording by
Cathy Murillo near the speaker in the back of the room.
Schedule: This OLPA episode started playing on cable TV-17 on 05 March 2008, per the replay schedule above (more or less), including scheduled replays on the 3 consecutive days Saturday to Monday. It replayed about 10 times between 05 and 20 March.
Watch the Video of this show!! (28 minutes, although file length is 41 min.)
For a FULL SCREEN option, link on the
Google label and select the lower right arrow icon for the
Smooth Video option.
Viewers may disagree with some of the statements and allegations said by various people in this video, so comments can be entered here (to this blog post) as a response and factual correction. The video file here includes an extra 10 minutes of group discussions and even more explanation by Pritchett about the planning process. That extra content could not fit into the 28-minute version edited for the TV replay.
