I went to my precinct caucus last night. Before I left, I checked the messages on our answering machine. One of our neighbors called last week to see if KyKy could babysit for them while they attended the caucus. Ooops. Too late now. (Note to self: check answering machine more than once every week or so.) KyKy had expressed in interest in coming with me to watch the process. Awesome. She'll get to see democracy in action. When we got there, there was a pretty big crowd. It was fun to see neighbors who I hadn't seen in a few months, since we're all holed up in our homes for the winter. I went to apologize to the neighbors who needed the babysitter for not returning their call, and we ended up sitting next to them. KyKy met Henry, the child in need of the baby sitter, and kept him entertained most of the night. Faux Pax averted.
While it was nice to see so many people show up for caucuses, (over 400) I don't know how instructive it was for KyKy. When you get that many people in a room with bunch of different agendas, it's like herding cats. A good portion of the time we were there was spent wrangling over the delegates who would go on the the district convention. The magic number was 35. If 36 people wanted to be delegates there was the danger of sub-caucusing which would entail lots of jockeying and horse trading of votes and delegates. Thankfully, no one wanted to go through that and the slate of delegates chosen pretty much represented the whole group when it came to the Senate race (about half for Franken and about half for Nelson-Pallmeyer, which is no surpise since he's probably the most liberal of the three running for Senate). After muddling through the choosing of delegates, it was onto resolutions. One of my neighbors told me that in previous years this precinct passed a resolution to secede from the United States. We didn't stick around to see if there were any truly wacko resolutions, but there was one, which was defeated, to require the Hiawatha Light Rail line put in turnstiles at station platforms. (Whoops, look at the time - gotta go home and get the kids to bed.)
While I like the idea of the deliberative nature of the caucus, I'm not sure it is the best way to pick candidates. It's fun to get together with neighbors, but it excludes people who work, who have child care responsibilities etc. Plus we were supposed to get all the business done in 2 hours. Fat chance. If we ran past 9 pm, there would be an extra charge for the room we were using so there was this extra incentive to get it done and get out of there. In reality our time was not really spent in discussion or deliberation, it was mostly parliamentary procedure and bureaucratic housekeeping.
I say have a primary to choose candidates and save the long dull meetings for hammering out a platform. Don't mix the two at this level.
Oh, and Obama beat Hillary 329 to 77 at our caucus.
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3 comments:
And which version of change did you support?
Truth be told, I voted for Edwards. He was the only "serious" canditate that was pushing a more progressive agenda. I think he actually made Hillary and Obama talk a bit more about economic justice and health care, for what it's worth. If I was truly serious about a progressive agenda, I should have voted for Kucinich.
Kucinich (and not just 'cos Cleveland Rocks!) and then Edwards were my choices. I'm disappointed they didn't stick around to push Clinton and Obama on class and health insurance issues.
I do have to say I'm taking a little too much joy in watching the Republicans tear each other apart--not the candidates, the talking heads on the news shows.
And what's up with Romney in Minnesota? A week later, I still scratch my head about that one. Who will the Rs in your state support now that he's gone?
BTW, John is here with me as I write this and he wants to say, "Go Obama!" (I think he was for Edwards before he dropped out--it's a "John thing" that thankfully did not transfer to McCain.)
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