It was my first $1,000-a-plate Democratic fund-raiser (courtesy of a friend), and all I got was mashed potatoes, spinach, and water.
The setting: Ron Burkle's Beverly Hills mansion. The problem: too many people -- 1,500 -- who came to see John Kerry.
Organizers seemed overwhelmed by the turnout, which was a measure of the anti-Bush passion in liberal strongholds like this one. The March 30 event had originally been billed as "a meet-and-greet for a couple of hundred people," then it was redefined as a 750-person event with a performance by James Taylor. But twice that number signed up.
Burkle's backyard was big enough for 1,500 people, but getting all of them up a narrow hillside road to the five-acre compound proved a great organizational challenge. We were told not to try to drive to the house, as the street would be closed. Instead, we were told to report to a parking structure in downtown Beverly Hills, where waiting vans would transport us up the hill. But gridlock quickly froze all traffic in and out of the site, and a thousand people with expensive suits and really good hair spent an hour standing in line on the street as the sun set. When the vans finally got my group to the mansion, most of the food was gone. And the bar was closed.
But there were enough chairs for almost everybody, and the program didn't disappoint. The highlight was not Kerry but, rather, Larry David, star of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, who gave a hilarious and extremely clever speech about why he should be the vice-presidential candidate. "[George W.] Bush was in the National Guard," he said. "I was in the Army Reserve. I'll go nose to nose with him on that one."
The MC for the evening was Antonio Villaraigosa, now a Los Angeles city councilman and leading Latino progressive, who lost a heartbreakingly close election for mayor of L.A. in 2001. He had been one of the first to endorse Kerry "in the dark days before Iowa," and Kerry paid tribute to him as "a rising star" (which had the people in my section buzzing about a cabinet appointment). Villaraigosa announced the night's take: $3 million.
Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, a local, said a few words, and then it was Kerry's turn. Although the response was uneven, he did a pretty good job with his stump speech. Some parts went flat; his laundry list of women's issues was met with stone silence, as was his vague invocation of "education." But he got a big response for criticizing Bush on the environment, and more applause when he denounced the president for "cynically using the Constitution in an election year against gays and lesbians" -- although the gays and lesbians I was sitting with all remarked that he was supporting the proposed legislation in Massachusetts banning gay marriage.
This audience of wealthy liberals responded passionately to one issue above all: the Iraq War. Kerry's line is, "The United States of America should never to go war because it wants to; it should only go to war because it has to." He seemed a lot more engaged and passionate talking about international affairs -- about "rejoining the community of nations" -- than about domestic politics.
The next morning, the Los Angeles Times reported that all of Hollywood's Democratic Party royalty -- Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman, Leonardo DiCaprio, Angelica Huston, Lucy Liu, Jason Alexander, Danny DeVito, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, and Jennifer Aniston -- had been there.
I bet they got more to eat than I did.
Jon Wiener is a contributing editor at The Nation and teaches American history at the University of California, Irvine.
