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.
