Democratic Party Delegate Selection Committee
In early 1969, Mixner was invited to join the Delegate Selection Committee, which had been created during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Although Mixner’s appointment turned out to be a mistake, as Senator Fred R. Harris of Oklahoma was supposed to invite Mixner to join the less powerful Rules Committee, he nonetheless made his mark on the twenty-eight member body, which included Warren Christopher, who would later become Secretary of State, Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa, Senator Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois and Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, who served as the Committee’s Chairman.
By virtue of his inadvertent inclusion on the Delegate Selection Committee, Mixner served as his generation’s lone voice, and he intended the use the platform to raise the issue of the violence at the previous year’s convention. When Senator Kennedy, a close friend of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and the party’s front-runner for the 1972 Presidential nomination, took the witness stand, Mixner used the opportunity to ask Kennedy if he would publicly condemn both the tactics used by the Chicago police and the Mayor for his involvement. Kennedy dodged the question. Subsequently, Adlai Stevenson III sought to exclude Mixner from a committee meeting in Chicago where Mayor Daley was scheduled to testify. McGovern called Mixner, asking him not to attend, but Mixner refused. When he arrived for the meeting, drawing the ire of Senator Stevenson, McGovern offered him a compromise, promising to ask Daley to apologize for the violence and offer all those arrested amnesty if Mixner agreed to stay quiet. The resulting exchange between McGovern and Daley, included Daley’s insistence that "If people violate the law they should accept the consequences of the law."
The McGovern Commission, which had set out to reform the Presidential nomination process in order to avoid a repeat of the 1968 Convention, eventually issued its recommendations, including the requirement that all delegates be directly elected by the people, eviscerating the power of political bosses to control the nomination process.
Read more about this topic: David Mixner
Famous quotes containing the words democratic party, democratic, party, selection and/or committee:
“The Republican party makes even its young men seem old; the Democratic Party makes even its old men seem young.”
—Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)
“The democratic youth ... lives along day by day, gratifying the desire that occurs to him, at one time drinking and listening to the flute, at another downing water and reducing, now practising gymnastic, and again idling and neglecting everything; and sometimes spending his time as though he were occupied in philosophy.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“From now on, I think it is safe to predict, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will ever nominate for President a candidate without good looks, stage presence, theatrical delivery, and a sense of timing.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Judge Ginsburg’s selection should be a model—chosen on merit and not ideology, despite some naysaying, with little advance publicity. Her treatment could begin to overturn a terrible precedent: that is, that the most terrifying sentence among the accomplished in America has become, “Honey—the White House is on the phone.””
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“What are men celebrating? They are all on a committee of arrangements, and hourly expect a speech from somebody. God is only the president of the day, and Webster is his orator.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)