We left early to avoid getting caught in a massive parking exodus. When we turned out of the Exposition site onto Decker Road, we were utterly stunned. We saw cars parked all along the road in both directions. For the next mile and a half up to Martin Luther Kind Blvd. there were cars parked on both sides of the road, and there was every reason to believe the same was true in the opposite direction. In many places cars had double parked alongside those on the roadsides. Wherever there was any open space, like a construction site, cars were parked. People had given up on getting into the parking lot, had just parked and then hoofed a half-mile or so to the center. One delegate reported that he and his son walked 40 minutes to the convention center.

And Decker was not the only road leading to the center.

I’m a former Austin resident now living in Staten Island, New York, relying on the media for most of my understanding of what is gong on politically. I came to Austin for a reunion with friends I had worked with in the desegregation process of AISD back in the late 70s. The friends I am staying with invited me to attend the county convention. Being a political animal I thought that would be interesting and probably informative, but not much more than that. How misleading uninformed assumptions can be! It was an extraordinary experience, something I would never have imagined, even having heard about the amazing turnout of voters across the country. Being in one was believing. Standing in one part of the upper seats of the convention center in the din of all the noise with a speech blaring out from the podium, I did a slow ‘360’, like a TV camera scanning the whole scene of the upper seats and the floor. It was the kind of political image I had seen on TV screens since I was 14. But those were national conventions dominated by big names and big-wheel dealings. What was going on here was something entirely different.

Here was the outcome of the early organizing efforts to give coherent shape to the tsunami of raw political energy that overwhelmed the woefully understaffed, but eventually successful, staff of the local party.

Currently I am doing a study of the participatory democracy of worker-owner cooperatives in western Massachusetts. This involves a lot of interviewing, and I came to Austin right after a work trip to that region. I still had my digital recording equipment with me. So I seized the opportunity the convention offered me, and went around talking to various people. I briefly interviewed about 50 people, most of them in small clusters belonging to the same precinct.

The internet and print news outlets I use are full of reports about and analyses of what the official and unofficial national spokespeople of the Clinton and Obama campaigns are putting out and doing. If Travis county reflects what is happening at the grassroots across the country, then the media is missing the ball game. (Surprise, surprise!) What I encountered in talking with the street people of Travis county was something entirely different. Every precinct group had Obama and Clinton supporters, and their feelings for their candidates were passionate and personally meaningful. Every precinct group, however, was unified. Here was the “new politics” that is not happening at the national campaign level. Travis County was a unified convention because its precincts had worked out their relationships with each other so that they could respect each other's differences. They did this because their priority was to hold together and nurture the coherent democratic power they came out to generate in the first place. As speaker after speaker at the full convention thumped for unity in the general election no matter whom the nominee, and the convention hall would rock with approval without lessening their energetic support for the candidate they preferred. I talked with few independents and “former” Republicans who got involved in the process because of Obama, and they tended to say they wouldn’t back Hilary. And there wre one or two Clinton supporters who expressed similar feelings in the other direction. They were clearly exceptions to the rule. And each of them was there because of Bush. My hunch is that if they see McCain as more or less Bush III or Ambush, then they might not be able to go that route.

PROBLEM: There was one big discordant note, but one that is probably unavoidable at this point in the process. The structure and the dynamic of the way the county convention was managed were clearly out of synch with the coherence I experienced in conversations with precinct groups. At the precinct level, ordinary citizens seemed to have achieved a remarkable degree of organization that was personally meaningful. And the county staff seems to have supported, joined and rode that focused energy into a county convention that accomplished its necessary tasks. But clearly the traditional form of pulling it together for the county was way outmoded for the kind of participation that has erupted this year. The state party rules for this kind of meeting are grounded in assumptions that relate to an era dominated by citizen passivity and isolation.

In “The Populist Moment,” Lawrence Goodwin tells the story of the agrarian revolt during the last three decades of the19th century. It started in Texas, with Austin being one of its centers, as the Farmers Alliance, a network of cooperatives to combat the odious sharecropper system. It grew into what Goodwin calls “the last mass movement for democracy in American history,” spreading into almost all 48 states with 40,000 organizers (they called them “lecturers”) reaching millions of agrarian Americans and seeking alliances with the early labor movements. In one riveting scene he describes what it was like to be involved in the gathering of one of the county conventions in Texas where one could see lines of wagons extending as far as the eye could see.

Is this the beginning of something profoundly new? I guess that depends on how deep one thinks profound is. Personally, I’m definitely convinced that the kind of profound changes that can achieve a deep realization of democracy in our country are going to require a long, long haul. Several generations. However, I would say that what is happening now in Austin is deep enough to make a major shift in 2008, and that it offers the Travis County Democratic party, which is currently dominated by mass participation, the opportunity to develop a whole new kind of Democratic party. Further, it seems from two conversations I had—one with Andy Brown, the incoming chair of the county party and the other with Elliot Navistar, a long-time state representative—that this is the direction the party leaders are looking toward. But it is a brand new game for them, and their success in their roles will require that they start more from scratch and go less with what they know. It's a daunting and exciting place to be.

For sure, hope is now alive and doing well in Travis county, Texas.