Carolyn Dechaine is the co-host (with Jim Girard) of the Santa Fe chapter of Drinking Liberally, which meets the second and fourth Thursday of each month at Il Vicino (321 W. San Francisco St.,www.drinkingliberally.org).SFR: How did you get involved with Drinking Liberally?
CD: I started going to meetings in the summer of 2005. The Santa Fe chapter hadn’t been going on long at that point, and I was one of the more vocal members. So when the leaders moved away they asked Jim [Girard] and I if we’d take over. It’s been about a year.
What exactly happens at a Drinking Liberally meeting?
Drinking Liberally is on a political discussion salon format. It’s really casual; it’s a social thing. The purpose is to create engagements. We’ve been very Santa Fe laid back in our structuring of it. People come and get into whatever they want to get into. For awhile we tried to have a little more structure and to let people take the floor for five or 10 minutes if they wanted to. We still do that if people ask for that, but the looser format seems to work better for everyone.
Which issues are more popular, the local ones or the national ones?
That shifts over time. I’m interested, personally, in local politics, which is where I’m most involved. But we have some regular members who are bloggers and are really looking to come talk to people face to face about national issues. Certainly since the presidential campaign has been underway national issues have been dominant.
Why didn’t you guys endorse one of the candidates?
Drinking Liberally is a national organization, with 232 chapters around the country, and we’re all under this umbrella of Drinking Liberally. Even though each chapter varies, the purpose is to create a place where people can come talk to like-minded people. So it’s like a piece of a person’s overall political life. It’s the piece that’s about discourse and so a lot of us may work on a candidate’s campaign, and come and talk passionately about that candidate or whatever issues an activist works on, but it’s just about fleshing out ideas. Drinking Liberally becomes a place to work on specific ideas, in a way that it wouldn’t be if it had a specific agenda, action or goal.
