caucusing
We went caucusing tonight, for the first time ever. It was educational.
Holly and I have been registered as independents since forever, so we switched parties when we got there. It was pretty painless, although it took a while. No one seemed prepared to cope with the number of people who showed up, and the registration line was looong. From hearing people talk, there were a number of independents showing up to switch to the Democratic party, and a few Republicans were switching as well.
There were 417 caucus-goers in our precinct. The Obama precinct captain mentioned that as of yesterday they were expecting a maximum of 240.
The caucusing procedure used by the Iowa Democrats is interesting and strange; I read about it but didn’t really understand it until it was all over. It is the opposite of a secret ballot, as you are required to make your choice in full view of all of the other participants.
Here’s how it worked at our precinct (Iowa Republicans do it differently, so I can’t comment there):
After waiting in a long line, we all milled about in a large conference room in the community center until the doors were shut. They announced the count (417), and the fact that this meant we’d be electing 9 delegates to the convention (and that’s a county convention, I believe).
At this point we had settled into our “preference groups”. I’ll let Holly tell you which group she was in, if she wants, but at this point I was one of only 12 standing in the undecided column. I know the number because a count was taken of each group, and announced to the room.
The caucus chairman announced further that the viability threshold for our caucus was 63. The caucus rules state that a preference group needs 15% of the attendees in order to be viable.
No candidates other than the top 3 met this requirement. The largest of the secondary groups was 25, in the Richardson camp.
The caucus chairman then announced that 30 minutes would be given for discussion. He asked for a volunteer speaker from each of the preference groups, in alphabetical order. Each group got a chance to speak — even the Kucinich group (4 strong), even the lone iconoclast who declared for the “draft Gore” movement. The undecideds were asked as well, but there were no takers.
One thing that was really driven home at this point was the importance of each candidate’s local organization. The big three each had precinct captains representing the campaign, and they gave pretty decent speeches. None of the speakers from the non-viable preference groups gave impassioned pleas for others to join them; the Kucinich speaker joked about the difficulty in getting people to vote for an “unelectable” candidate, even though most of the people she had been calling told her they agreed with Kucinich’s positions. The Biden speaker made a modest effort at convincing people in the non-viable groups to band together and elect an unaffiliated delegate to the convention, but even he didn’t seem to be taking it seriously.
In fact, all of the speakers were brief and good-humored. I was, I admit, expecting hard sells and horse trading, a sort of political market bazaar complete with shouting and hand waving. The speakers generally said one or two nice things about their own candidates, and didn’t try to directly convince others to defect to their own sides, nor put down competing candidates. There were only a couple of exceptions; an elderly gentleman speaking for the Richardson crowd closed his speech by predicting that he’d end the evening standing for one of the candidates who “got here on their fat pocketbooks”, which earned a few shocked faces in the Clinton camp. And I did hear the Edwards precinct captain mutter “bullshit!” when the speaker for Clinton told the Kucinich/Dodd/Richardson/Biden supporters that Hillary’s positions were pretty close to those candidates’.
Best moment of the night, IMHO: after everyone had a chance to talk, the chairman asked if any group wanted to field another speaker. A young man stepped forward from the Obama camp, and said something like the following (I’m trying for verbatim and probably failing, here):
My name is ____, and I’m a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. I’d like you to remember that many of tonight’s candidates voted to place me and my comrades in harm’s way. Many of them now say that they made a mistake. Some things though, some things are too important to make a mistake, that’s all.
He was trembling a little as he walked back to his seat to general applause. I thought it was nerves or just strong emotion, but when I found him later to shake his hand, he was still trembling where he sat, and it seemed to be more like a kind of palsy, enough to make me wonder about the less visible kind of war wounds.
This dovetailed pretty nicely with what I had been thinking. All three of the top Democratic candidates had something to recommend them, and each had also done a few things that pissed me off (I won’t go into it; this post is long enough). But my most closely felt issue is and has been and will be the war. I don’t know if I could ever trust the political judgement of someone who voted to authorize it.
So in the end I marched out of the undecided group and into the Obama camp. I might have gone with one of the lesser-known candidates if there had been a credible effort to keep them going, but once the half-hour was up everyone was standing for one of the big three.
Obama won four delegates from our precinct; Edwards won three, and Clinton two.
Daphne, of course, was happy to stump for anyone who would give her a sticker.
I don’t know if I’ll remain a registered Democrat for long, but It was interesting and strangely satisfying compared to the sterility of a ballot box.
Now we get to turn the ringers of our phones back on without fear of an incipient poll, and just sit back to enjoy the drama for the next 10 months, this time as spectators. I’m looking forward to it.
