On May 22 about 40 people gathered at Bennigan’s in Panama City as a part of John Kerry’s nationwide (and worldwide) meeting, which took place in people’s homes and restaurants and union halls and other small locales all across the USA and in similar meeting places of Democrats abroad. Kerry addressed everyone by way of a conference telephone call, sounding the main themes of his campaign and letting his supporters everywhere get to meet their like-minded neighbors in relatively small and informal settings.
Compared to the Republican organization on the isthmus, this was a late start for the Dems, a meeting called mainly by email a few days before the event. However, the group was impressive in its way, including past presidents of both the American Society and the American Chamber of Commerce, faces you may have seen onstage at the Theatre Guild, members of core Democratic constituencies like retired teachers and nurses, US diplomats, a few expatriate business execs, some American women who have married into prominent Panamanian families, people from the left and right ends of the Democratic spectrum and even a few curious or disenchanted Republicans.
Could there be a gathering of local Democrats without writer Richard Koster? That would be hard to imagine, and in this sense nobody’s imagination was challenged.
Kerry’s Internet phone connection was less than perfect and mysteriously went out for a few minutes when he began to speak about the Iraq War. But that was toward the end of his talk.
The Democrats’ standard bearer emphasized economic issues first and foremost, blasting Bush for being the first US president in a very long while to preside over an economy with a net loss of jobs, for high prices at the gasoline pump, for low wages for working people, for cuts in health programs and student loans, and for a deficit “that’s gonna fall on the shoulders of our children.”
“Never have I seen the government of this country so dysfunctional,” Kerry continued, characterizing George W. Bush as a rigid ideologue who has run up the national debt, turned his back on key American traditions and alienated the country’s friends and admirers abroad. “We will live up to our values in this world” if the Democrats win the November elections, Kerry promised.
Before and after Kerry’s speech, several of the locals addressed the gathering. Former American Society president Rita Sosa, a retired American government teacher, gave advice on how just about any American citizen to register and vote in the presidential election by absentee ballot. (If you have questions about this, call the US consulate, and do it sooner rather than later so that your ballot doesn’t arrive in the mail the day after Election Day.)
Koster, the author of seven books (six novels and the anti-dictatorship polemic “In the Time of the Tyrants), who taught at the local branch of Florida State University for many years and represented the old Canal Zone at Democratic conventions beginning in 1964, recounted Kerry’s life history with approval. “Those of us who live here owe him a debt of gratitude” for his Senate hearings on the Noriega regime’s drug ties, Koster noted.
Koster cited with approval Kerry’s occasional stands against his Massachusetts constituency and against his own party for the sake of the nation’s interests. “We need a president who will call the entire country to service --- we need that service very badly right now.”
Contrary to the claims in the anonymous Republican screeds that have been circulating on the Internet, Kerry was not only an antiwar activist but before that a decorated war hero. “He’s not going to have to prove how tough he is with somebody else’s blood,” Koster said. “We shouldn’t go to war on a whim. We shouldn’t go to war for a lie. We shouldn’t go to war by mistake.”
This was a gathering of Democrats, and had those present wished to act out one of the old party traditions, there might have been a factional row over foreign policy, race relations, gender issues, economic policies or who gets what party post. But Panama’s Democrats did not come to Bennigan’s to argue with one another. They came with the perception that America is in a grave crisis, and in a mood to set aside differences for the sake of the country.
After the speeches people mingled and chatted around tables, and this reporter got a chance to sit down with Koster and talk about the local Democratic tradition then and now, and the challenges of the moment.
Koster worries more about the future of the United States than the outcome of this year’s election. He fears that Osama bin Laden’s people will launch a spectacularly horrible attack on the United States between now and the November elections. In a bit longer term, he fears a meltdown of American civilization. “The Soviet Union broke up into chaos,” he noted, “and it could happen to us too.”
This year’s prospects for the Democratic Party look brighter to him. “I can’t imagine Bush getting re-elected. I have a feeling we will take the White House and both houses of Congress.”
But then the party would inherit leadership of a country that has exported most of its industrial might, that’s isolated in world opinion and that’s saddled by heavy debts. It could mean a short-lived Democratic hold on power when voters hold those in office at the moment responsible for long-term problems. “But maybe that won’t happen,” Koster speculated. “Maybe it will be like 1933,” when people lowered their expectations, set aside their selfish demands and came together in families and communities across America to confront the Great Depression.
Taking a more local view, Koster said that in recent years the American community in Panama has been “naturally Republican,” but added that in many cases “George W. Bush has converted them” into ex-Republicans. “There are a lot of premises that don’t work anymore,” he added, arguing that the Democrats will have to offer more modern and sophisticated approaches to contemporary problems if they are to win those alienated Republicans to their side.
And, looking back, what was it like for Koster to be a Democratic delegate from the Canal Zone, when these days among Panamanians the word “Zonian” is often defined as a particular sort of belligerent reactionary redneck?
“It’s always bad to generalize, and very bad to generalize pejoratively,” he argued.
Zonians, he said, were Americans who lived outside of the country, a condition that tended to heighten their sense of patriotism. They were overwhelmingly blue-collar, and predominantly from the southern states. Starting in the 1920s, the Canal Zone, although it had no elections of its own, was predominantly Democratic. They were “old-fashioned Democrats,” as Koster put it. In 1960, even after John F. Kennedy had sewn up the nomination, the Canal Zone chose a Democratic delegation that was solidly committed to Lyndon B. Johnson.
But from the end of World War II through about 1980, “every important question was debated within the Democratic Party,” and the Republicans, who stood largely outside the fray, tended to pick up those who left the party disenchanted.
The Canal Zone Democrats “began to have a big problem in the 1960s,” principally over the issues of civil rights and America’s response to the worldwide end of colonialism.
Koster rejects the application of the colonial label to either the Canal Zone or US relations with Panama. “Nobody owned anything” in the Canal Zone, he pointed out. However, the recognition that Panamanians had rights in the enclave “was a huge trauma,” both for Zonian society in general and for the Canal Zone Democrats.
In any case, desegregation and one of President Kennedy’s last acts in office, his executive order that the Panamanian and American flags should fly side by side in the civilian areas of the former Canal Zone, polarized Zonian society to the detriment of the Democrats.
But meanwhile on the military bases, while the white majority of the troops was increasingly Republican, black and Hispanic service men and women remained solidly Democratic. It was by signing up black military personnel and dependents that the Canal Zone Democrats elected a delegation that supported the Mississippi Freedom Democrats’ challenge to the all-white official delegation at the 1964 convention, and that supported party reforms in 1968.
The infusion of votes from the blacks on the bases resulted in the election of Elizabeth Andrews, an Army sergeant’s wife who became the Canal Zone’s first black delegate to a Democratic convention. Later, after her husband retired from the service, Koster ran across her on a convention floor, where she was a delegate from Georgia.
After the Canal Zone’s formal demise the local party restyled itself as the Latin American Democratic Party, and later still they hooked up with Democrats Abroad. But as the US Armed Forces gradually withdrew, the black military families that had been the dominant force in local Democratic politics disappeared and the organization withered.
So what might the future hold for Democrats on the isthmus? Koster isn’t sure. There is an influx of American retirees, some of whom are driven by harsh economic realities that allow them to live more dignified lives here than they could in the states, and that might be a natural Democratic constituency. Others, who come here in an attempt to escape US taxes, take advantage of cheap labor or immerse themselves in get rich quick schemes, Koster views as the dregs of a culture of selfishness that represents most of what is wrong with US society in general and the Republican Party in particular.
Because Panama did not organize a chapter of Democrats Abroad in time, those who gathered at Bennigan’s and the other isthmian Dems who couldn’t make it to the meeting won’t be represented at this year’s Democratic convention. But all across America, if anyone wants to pay attention to electoral minutia, Panama’s Democrats --- and Republicans --- will show up in the absentee vote.
Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
USAID cuts off Panama's courts
Torture pictures and the law
Endara predicts new constitution despite PRD opposition
Young illegal immigrants easy prey in the USA
American Democrats gather in Panama
