Little Bands of People

At the final meeting of the Beverly Hills Democratic Club only 11 members showed up.

They met for dinner, drank wine, awarded a plaque to the outgoing president and remembered the good old days when the club packed them in.

There were tears and speeches by the few who gathered at the wake, emotional goodbyes to a club that had been a way of life for 41 years.

Then, out of words and out of tears, they packed up their memories and their fire for political involvement and went home.

“What that represented,” Fran Blumberg would say later, “was the death of the grass-roots movement. We don’t count anymore. Big money is in charge.”

Blumberg had been a member of the club for 35 years and had seen its numbers erode from more than 200 to the handful that remained at the end.

In its prime it was one of the largest Democratic clubs in the country, attracting the kinds of speakers that shaped the courses of government on both state and national levels.

Standing-room-only audiences cheered the speakers or challenged them and then wrote letters and rang doorbells to get their messages across. A monthly newsletter called the Commentator went out to a mailing list of 900.

“But that’s all gone,” Blumberg said to me one day in her small Westside apartment. A photograph of Bill Clinton dominated the living room. “We’re obsolete now. It’s sad and it hurts.”

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The death of a political club, whether it’s in Beverly Hills or Pacoima, is hardly the kind of stuff I’m going to get weepy about. You’d have to drag me behind a team of horses to hear some lying, self-serving politico discuss the moral level of America when he’s finding a thousand ways to suck the country dry of any morality it might have had in the first place.

But I did begin to wonder about Blumberg’s comment that there was no grass-roots movement anymore, no “band of little people,” as someone once called them, to help direct the course of events in a troubled democracy.

I’m not a political reporter, as just about everyone probably already knows, but I have covered politics from time to time over the past 40 years. And one politician I’ve followed around the state and the country more than others is former Gov. Jerry Brown.

I was with him both times he ran for president, and it seems to me he represented the grass-roots movement as much as any candidate we’ve had running for anything in recent years. He’s in Oakland now doing a syndicated radio talk show that is heard down here on KPFK, and he is leading an organization called “We the People” that he founded after his last campaign.

Brown agrees with Blumberg and says the grass-roots movement has been usurped by what he calls the “Astroturf movement.” It’s composed of organizations that charge millions to buy whatever they need to win elections, and use computers in place of people.

In a telephone conversation with Brown, I heard him say that the Democratic Party was dead and decomposing or, even worse, was being kept barely alive by foreign money and fund-raising dinners in Hollywood. They just don’t need the little band of people anymore.

And that’s the reason, Brown says, that the Beverly Hills Democratic Club has dwindled into oblivion.

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In its final years of existence, the club’s members were mostly middle-aged. They had only one young member, Blumberg says, and she had no idea what the term grass-roots even meant.

The club’s last president was Carol Miller. She told me that day in Blumberg’s apartment that they tried hard to recruit young people but none seemed interested.

“They have the worst voting record in the country,” she said. “They seem to have written off government as corrupt and controlled by special interests. They’ve just tuned out.”

The younger people don’t care and the older people are afraid to go out at night so the last gallant handful gathered at that dinner two days after Christmas and toasted the glory that used to be.

Tom Quinn, who ran Brown’s 1976 presidential campaign and later held state office, doesn’t see it exactly as the end of the Democratic Party.

“For whatever reason,” he told me the other day, “the culture has just changed. People are staying home more. They’re not going to union meetings as much or even hanging out in bars. It’s affected social activism too. The passion has just drained away.”

Well, as I said, I’m not crying into my martini over the end of a club that may have just run its course. Even good things die. But I am wondering what’s going to happen to the glorious idea of a government by the people when power is completely married to money and the aisle to leadership is strewn with thousand-dollar bills.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com