P was squimish all week about her first caucus.
“Who will see me? Why do I have to tell anyone else who I am going to vote for? I hate dealing with political people.”
All valid points, so it didn’t shock me when we pulled into the local high school in a long line of cars with thousands of other people for the 1 p.m. start and she flatly declared: “I am not going. You just go and I’ll pick you up.”
See, I knew what to expect. In fact, I rode the caucus system so far in 1988, I was a second alternate delegate to the national convention…which basically meant I was treated well at how by the state party, but I didn’t make the travel squad. But I was young and it was fun. I even went to a small dinner hosted by the governor in the mansion and drank champagne and no one carded me…very sneaky cool thing to have done at the time.
Anyway, I made my whole spiel to P about how this is the most fun form of voting. We’ve hid 20 years behind absentee voting and primary systems, and she needs to just try a caucus. Besides, in our state if she wanted to vote for who she wanted and have the vote count, this was the only way to do it.
We caucused as Ds and it was nuts. A whole legislative destrict showed up in one place…all 40 precincts. I mean we’re talking a mass of people. I kind of felt like an old timer though because I had done the whole process at the last one in ‘88. I bet there weren’t many of u there who had. It was either people that looked like they hadn’t been born then, or people with gray hair and canes; that’s a harsh way to put it, but you could cut it with a butter knife it was so soft in the middle.
So we found our precinct group and huddled together for about a half an hour to wait for them to tell us where to split up to. Here’s the first striking thing…even though are precinct only covers about four square miles, I had never seen any of these people before in my life.
In fact, it became a contest via txtng between P and I to see how many people we knew total. We ended up with 11 between us…and that’s for the whole district.
So the magic time comes and we all head to the auditorium, which seats about 1,000 and was open to all precincts that had more than 25 voters. We had 27. By this point it becomes more and more obvious that this is going to be an Obama runaway. His campaign even had a precinct captain, which means “uh, oh” for Hillary.
Here’s the way it works…everyone signs in and basically signs an oath and declares for a canididate or uncomitted. That’s round one.
Then, if you’re candidate doesn’t have 15 percent of the total in your precinct, you can be uncomitted or leave.
Everyone was cmmitted.
Obama 18, Clinton 9.
Easy enough.
Then comes round two. You argue and try to get people to switch sides. This is important because it’s all proportional. You get a whole delegate for every whole percent of the people voting in you precinct. Then we all say we are good and sign for a final candidate.
Now, our Hillary group of nine was happy to hear we got three delegates to Obama’s 11. Then chaos. The Obama people knew immediately that if they could get one of us to switch to uncomitted as a final vote, we would only get two delegates. So they started going after our flip flopper possibility who was easily identified. A very yound white woman who was mad it was taking so long to do it.
But here’s the kicker. She actually enjoyed switching just because all the ttention from the 18 Obama people seemed like fun.
Ugh.
So at the last possible moment she took away one of our Clinton delegates.
Democracy can be a pain in the ass.
Now, each group had to elect one county/state delegate and one alternate delegate for each spot. That now meant half of our group of eight had to take four positions. Crap.
So then it got funny. I nominated P to be a delegate. So decided unamiously. I am an alternate.
Although I was practically bleeding irony out of my ears at this point because this was a woman who as hour earlier wasn’t even coming, I have to admit I admire the fact she did it. Everyone should do it one time. I mean, there were people out of those thousands that were honestly bummed because they didn’t get to be a state delegate. The thing I was most proud of is that she doth not protest at all.
Now, even after the caucus there were complaints on talk radio and stuff about how long it took (about two hours) and how complicated the process was (you do have to do more than fill in a dot), I get giddy over it. I really do think that a small part of the process of electing a POTUS should be, well, hard. You should be willing to stand up in a room with your neighbors and declare, at that moment, who you support…even if you change your mind and vote for, say even, a completely different party in November. And, I’ll add to that, those are the cream of the democracy crop, and they made some great points in passionate displays for several candidates. There was even a Richardson person at the next precinct that made me kind of wish I had given round one to him, just so I could stand up and say that if it was about experience and diplomacy in November, he was the obvious choice.
The downside of all this? Four years of invitations and junk mail for our house from the democratic party because we had to give them our address, phone number and an e-mail.
(Which is an interesting point, too…it was clearly *optional* if I wanted to tell them if I was, say, gay, or Asian. But unless you read the fine print on a seperate sheet, it never said a phone number or e-mail was optional. I just thought that was interesting. We just signed up to a giant junk e-mail system for the general election and took ourselves off the do not call list…zombies.)
P is still mad about the young turk that took away a Hillary delegate. She’s got more of this in her, in general, than I think she ants to admit sometimes. SHe’ll never be a big activist, but she is smart enough to know that the goal of the caucus is to get every delegate you can no matter how much you are getting your ass kicked.
The sweet, sweet smell of democracy like the Pilgrims did it.
