IF YOU WANT to understand how Pleasanton resident Jeff Nibert became a Democratic Convention delegate, you have to go back to his early childhood fascination with the luge.
A luge is a small sled that weighs more than 40 pounds. The rider — the luger — lies on his or her back with feet pointed downhill and goes shooting down the mountain on an icy track at speeds that can approach 100 miles an hour.
Nibert, a member of Pleasanton’s City Council and a California District 12 delegate to the convention, was watching the 1972 winter Olympics in Japan on TV as a kid when he first saw a luge.
The TV coverage of the event was brief, but when Nibert saw the men’s sled rocketing down the mountain, he was fascinated. “If I had known what to do to actually learn how to do it and compete, I would have,” he said. “But, you know, no internet back then and, you know, things come, things get in the way.”
Flash forward 40 years. Nibert had earned a B.S. in nuclear engineering from Penn State University and a master’s from University of California, Berkeley, in construction management. He was working at PG&E as a Senior Project Manager.
His wife gave the then 52-year-old an extraordinary Christmas present.
She’d learned that once a year USA Luge holds a fantasy camp where people can have the experience of riding a luge. At Lake Placid, Nibert was thrown together with USA Olympians. He was given a team uniform and took a spot on the luge.
On the track at Lake Placid there were five heights from which a luge could start, the higher the faster. His team went from the second lowest, what team members called the “tourist start.” They went perhaps 35 miles an hour. That was fast enough. “You definitely feel those G-forces on the curves. And it was very thrilling,” Nibert says.
That experience might have been enough for most people, but somehow Nibert found out that “anyone can become a luge official.” “You don’t have to have been an athlete or anything. Just, you know, learn the rulebook, and take the exam that you need to become an official and then keep up with, you know, actually officiating at events to stay sharp.”
Today Nibert serves as a volunteer international luge official, working at events all over the world.
How hard could it be?
How he became a delegate to the DNC is a bit like how he became a luge official.
This is Nibert’s third national convention. The first two were for Barack Obama. He had heard Obama speak on TV in 2004 and hoped that he’d run for president one day. When that happened, Nibert jumped in. Obama’s message of hope inspired him. He phone-banked and traveled around the region campaigning for Obama.
It was hard work but exhilarating. Along the way “I found out how to become a delegate and how easy it was … You simply sign up and get people to come vote for you. …”
Nibert laughed and said, “I looked at the list of other people who signed up to run for delegate. And I thought, well, why not me? I can do this. So that’s what I did.”
Nibert explained that the voting for delegates takes place in person. He said any Democrat who lives in the district can vote. The delegates are half male and half female. In that first election he teamed up with a woman in the district, pooling their families, friends, and supporters to run as a ticket. He won with 77 votes.
He successfully ran again in 2012. He sat out 2016, and 2020 was virtual because of COVID.
But in 2024 he ran and won again, this time with 43 votes, the leading vote-getter among the male candidates in his district. He believes that Joe Biden has been a historic president and was honored to be a Biden delegate. He was surprised when Biden said he would not run again; he thinks Biden would have done a great job governing. There is a bitter sweetness to it, but he is delighted to be a Harris delegate.
And he is very excited to attend the 2024 convention. It isn’t a boondoggle — he pays his own way — but he believes it is well worth it. He thinks 2024 will be like the 2008 convention when Obama was first nominated.
Nibert’s face breaks out with joy when he talks about that experience. He says that standing on the floor of the Mile High Stadium in Denver as Obama gave his acceptance speech was overwhelming. “It felt like we’d achieved a moment and that we were going to make history. … It was almost too much to comprehend, but very, very exciting.”
What he is most looking forward to in Chicago is the feeling of being with the “thousands of delegates there, all being in same celebratory frame of mind and the atmosphere of doing what’s right and helping our country.”
He feels “a sense of patriotism … to do one’s duty to contribute in, you know, whatever way that you can.”
What browning of America means for Harris/Walz
Black San Franciscan Steve Phillips is a student of the demographic changes that are browning the face of American politics, and he thinks Nate Cohn, political analyst for the New York Times, gets it wrong. Phillips believes that Cohn — and too often Democrats in general — don’t know how to interpret poll numbers from people of color.
Phillips has a weekly podcast, Democracy in Color, that looks at current politics through a racial lens and is the author of Brown is the New White, a 2016 book that profiles what he calls the “New American Majority.”
Brown’s premise, based on the coalition that elected Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, is simple enough: If Democrats can consistently win, as Obama did, a third of white voters and 80% of voters of color, the result is a solid electoral majority — and those numbers are growing every year.
“Every day, 7,000 new people of color are added to the population versus 1,000 whites,” Phillips says. “So the fundamentals remain that the New American Majority is the majority of the people, and it’s growing. And that’s why I was pretty vocal about how Biden did not need to step down. (Cohn) failed to understand the voter behavior, human behavior, the racial lens on politics. I always believed that the Black numbers were going to come around when it came down to the choice between Biden and Trump.”
Since Harris entered the race at the top of the ticket, polling of people of color has already shown a substantial jump in support for the Democrats, but Phillips believes those numbers will continue to rise.
“First, just as a numerical point, no (Democrat) has ever gotten less than 83% (of the Black vote).” In the most recent polls, “she’s only at 81%, and she’s Black. So you’ve got to expect that that number is going to go up. And then you layer on this launch, the 44,000 Black women on that Zoom call in a matter of hours, the Black male call, the enthusiasm. I don’t know what the right metaphor is. The dam is broken, or a rocket ship has taken off. So I think her Black number is going to be in the 90s, it’s going to be Obama level.”
And that, he believes, will put even “red” Florida into play.
“We’ve completely forgotten that Obama won Florida twice, that Andrew Gillum came within 34,000 votes out of 9 million of winning the gubernatorial in 2018. … So that’s where I feel the dam has broken. All of these constituencies who are, in fact, the majority have been disrespected and marginalized and the target, really, of Trump’s attacks and ire, and they are just beside themselves with enthusiasm.
“You combine that with the fact that Trump is not actually a very sophisticated political actor — he found one thing that kind of worked in 2016 and doesn’t have any other real tools in the toolbox — and they’re flailing. So I think the combination of all those realities has Harris in an extremely strong position.”
“A lot of people in the mainstream media are missing this point. It’s like, well, she should do an economics speech. All of these Black women across country did not jump on the Zoom because of her position on tax policy. This is an historic moment, and the chance for someone who comes from these backgrounds to be in the White House. It’s so close that people can really taste it. And that’s a pretty powerful force.”
Observations from Harris’s early days
Among the attack lines that Trump has tried out on Vice President Harris is the one he pulled out at a Q&A session with a group of journalists at a meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists.
In the midst of the session, Trump testily responded to a question about Harris, who has a Jamaican father and a mother of Indian heritage, saying “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
There was immediate blowback accusing Trump of racism and denigrating multi-racial Americans. Trump did not retract his remarks, standing pat on the idea that Harris had adopted her identity recently for opportunistic purposes.
Dianne Millner, a retired lawyer from Oakland, would stridently disagree. She remembers Kamala Harris from her earliest days as a law student.
Millner went to Stanford Law School, graduating at a time when there were no Black-owned law firms in Northern California doing corporate and institutional legal work. Millner and several friends wanted to change that, but as new graduates they realized that they needed to get solid experience before they were ready to go out on their own.
They took jobs with large established law firms. Millner worked at a hundred-year-old powerhouse law firm then known as Pillsbury Madison & Sutro, where she worked on real estate and corporate matters.
But the idea of starting a minority-owned firm didn’t go away. “We got great experience, but we always wanted to go out on our own. It was scary because that was also the era of really high interest rates. (But after) about five years, the others called me and said, ‘it’s about time’.”
They started the firm — then Ocampo, Millner & McGee — in 1980, opening an office in San Francisco. From the first they targeted corporate and institutional clients. “We represented some corporations. We represented some governmental entities.”
It was a time when a lot of financial institutions were failing, and they were hired by the Resolution Trust Corporation, the entity created to acquire and manage assets from failed banks. “And so we became pretty well known in the Black legal circles.”
They were joined by David Alexander, a Black lawyer from Oakland, and became Alexander, Millner & McGee. (Raymond Ocampo left to become the first general counsel of Oracle Corporation. He went on to co-found the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.)
Alexander remembered the early days of the firm. “We were coming up in an age when the political landscape in California and the Bay Area was changing, and there was more of an openness to see if these minority lawyers can really do this work.”
“We would grow to be the largest minority law firm in the country,” he said. And we ultimately had offices in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles.”
He was proud of the way that the firm developed. “The partners in our firm were all very anchored into and connected with our community.” They were active in the NAACP and local political organizations. “And we had a determination that we would give back to the community.”
‘We used to fight over her’
One day in 1986, Kamala Harris — then a first-year law student at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco (then called Hastings) showed up unannounced at the firm’s San Francisco office and asked for a job as a law clerk.
She was poised and confident and offered the law firm something that was very attractive to the still-fledgling firm: She offered to work for free in order to get the experience.
The firm accepted, and Harris spent the summer working with them.
It was a good decision. Alexander remembered that “We used to fight over her in terms of having her work or on my project … or Dianne’s, because she was very, very, very, very good.”
Alexander believes that Harris came to them because of the kind of firm they were. There were plenty of majority firms in San Francisco, but “she chose experience over money. She chose what we were about over how long we had been established. It was very unusual that you would find someone who would do that.”
Asked about Trump’s suggestion that Harris had only recently “turned Black,” Alexander said, “In some ways I feel insulted even trying to respond. … She went to an historically Black college. She was a member and is a member of a Black sorority. She was a student member of Charles Houston Bar Association, which is a Black bar association, and when she became a lawyer, she was a member of that world-renowned organization.”
And Trump? “He’s just dropping stones in the water, trying to muddy the waters.”
Millner said, “She liked the idea of working for us. Even at that time she was pretty committed to working in under-represented communities.”
“She chose experience over money. She chose what we were about over how long we had been established. It was very unusual that you would find someone who would do that.”
David Alexander, Oakland attorney at Alexander, Millner & McGee
Millner added, “We were doing work that we thought was important because we thought … you need underrepresented voices in all aspects of institutions. … that’s how you are going to eliminate racism and eliminate some of these racist tropes about Black attorneys.”
Over the years, Millner and Alexander have watched with pride as Harris pursued her storied ascent of positions: prosecutor in the district attorney’s office in Oakland and San Francisco, then elected as District Attorney in San Francisco, Attorney General of California, and Vice President.
Neither is surprised at her accomplishments, but Alexander identified a parallel that he does not think has been adequately noticed.
He asked what other lawyer went to Berkeley for law school, was a prosecutor in Alameda County, became District Attorney, went on to become California Attorney General, and later ran for Vice President?
The answer: Earl Warren, a Republican.
Warren didn’t win the nomination when he ran in 1952, but he was ultimately appointed to the Supreme Court, serving as Chief Justice of what came to be called the Warren Court, credited for many of the most consequential decisions on individual rights and liberties in American history, including Brown v. Board of Education.
Alexander said that Harris’s career path has shown “character and that she is not afraid of a fight and not afraid of a challenge. And where did we first see that? When she came into the office and knocked on the door and said ‘I want to work for you’.”
And finally from Milwaukee
As the Democratic Conventioneers began to convene for the Day 2 primetime festivities in Chicago, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were in Milwaukee for a rally in the very arena where Donald Trump and the RNC held their convention four weeks before. David Paul traveled to Milwaukee to see how that in-your-face move worked. As he waited for the rally to begin, he sent this report:
From the moment I arrived at the Fiserv Forum, the atmosphere was electric. Holding a rally 80 miles north of Chicago, while the DNC was just digging into the business that usually marks the beginning of the fall campaign, seemed to convey the notion that the campaign was already in full gear. The gloves are off, even if the starting gun has not officially sounded.
If holding a rally at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee was meant to troll the Trump campaign, it certainly should have that effect. Just last month, when the Republicans gathered in this building, they had an air of triumphalism, not only that they would win in November, but that the future was theirs.
The Harris-Walz rally at the venue of Republican ecstasy put an exclamation point on the fact that the political world has indeed turned upside down. And if, when the rally starts, the crowd inside is as large and pulsating with energy as the waiting crowd outside is already, it should peak Trump’s irritation.
It is not just that the race is no longer between Donald Trump and Joe Biden — two aging men whom much of the electorate was loath to choose between — it’s that the race is now between an aging man who has clearly lost his fastball and a woman at the peak of her powers. She is looking toward the future, intent on triggering Trump into fits of rage in the process.
Sitting here in anticipation of the rally that still seems hours away, I questioned the decision to hold the rally so close in time to when Barack Obama is scheduled to speak this evening in Chicago. But then I wondered whether this was a way of demonstrating that an energetic new administration can walk and chew gum at the same time.
Barack Obama can speak to the crowd in Chicago, just on the heels of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz speaking to the crowd in Milwaukee. I can imagine the images being broadcast into the United Center — and into American’s homes in prime time — of Harris and Walz out on the hustings, even as Barack Obama spurs the Democratic faithful onward.
Bay City News staff writer Joe Dworetzky is in Chicago with fellow BCN reporter Jay Harris and correspondent David Paul to report on the daily drama and curiosities at the Democratic National Convention. Learn more about their work here.
The post Day 2: How do you become a DNC delegate? Just ‘sign up and get people to vote for you’ appeared first on Local News Matters.