this is totally gonna work…

This past week has seen Washington State abuzz with the excitement over Saturday’s Caucuses. For the Democrats especially, this is an exciting time since the two candidates are running neck and neck and in the Evergreen State the Caucus is for all the marbles. So Saturday we headed over the local church for our precinct Caucus which was an absolute madhouse. There was a record turnout for the Caucuses and my personal experience certainly validated that.

Our particular location covered six precincts. I wish I had taken a snapshot of the precinct signup–it was utter chaos. I have no idea if there were any Fire Marshalls in the crowd, but they wouldn’t have been happy with what they saw. However, I did manage to get a snapshot of our precinct’s meeting:

This picture doesn’t really do justice to the size of the crowd. Our precinct had over sixty people register (though not all of them stayed for the meeting). This was my first Caucus and it was certainly an interesting and eye-opening experience. It was completely disorganized–our precinct head wasn’t there so we had to elect one. What we lacked in direction was made up for in earnest desire to pick the best candidate for the Democrats.

Like most of Washington State Democrats, our precinct was overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. That’s not to say that it was a room full of Hilary-haters. Indeed many Obama supporters voiced their pledge to support Clinton if she wins the nomination. However two themes emerged as people pled the case of Obama.

The first was that the sense of change that Senator Obama would bring to the nation is one that is desperately needed. The second is that having Senator Clinton in the Whitehouse would lead to four years of fractious fighting with the Republicans which would prevent the nation from addressing the stack of dire issues we face.

After we voted a couple of times, the final tally was held. We then split into the two camps. The Clinton camp needed to select one delegate to send to the city caucus and the Obama camp needed four delegates. At this point my wife and daughter left because Audrey, bless her heart, hung in like a trooper but was starting to fade. A Tootsie-pop can only take a kid so far. I stuck around for what I thought would be a lengthy delegate-selection process but what, in fact, only took about ninety seconds to decide. We selected four delegates and four backups in record time which sort of made up for the previous hour’s worth of bumbling.

We’ll see how the race turns out as this primary/caucus season unfolds, but it was certainly exciting to participate in the process and feel like it mattered.

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