Not so live blog: Caucus day

Well, the one thing about the iPhone is that it is very conspicuous, so my plans to sit and casually blog about the goings on of my precinct caucus while in my precinct caucus didn't work out so well. I did manage to make a couple of notes:

• There was a huge line to get in. Since no one ever goes to caucuses no one know what district they are in. And since districts are literally the size of one city block pretty much everyone who showed up needed to be directed to the right place. I count myself as one of those people.
• When I finally found the right building there was a long line there too.
• As I was standing in line I wondered: Is it a valid reason to support the candidate who's volunteers are cuter?
• I don't understand the whole "suspended" thing. There were signs everywhere telling people that Edwards' campaign was suspended rather than over. Is there really a difference? I don't know anyone who voted for Edwards, but I know that "Uncommitted" won at least one delegate. Wouldn't it suck to lose to Uncommitted?
• It turned out that we didn't really have a precinct chair. Which, in a caucus, is a ridiculously important job. Primaries are simple: you show up, you vote, you leave. There's a whole process to caucuses that no one understands. Our precinct's solution: find the last person who walked into the room and make them be the chair. The chair's first job: find someone to be the secretary, and then find at least 12 people willing to be our precinct's actual delegates for the county and state nominating conventions.
• My precinct was mostly women, and it kind of struck me that the caucus was turning out to be a fantastic place to find a date: politically like-minded people, cute girls, passionate arguments, etc.
• Sadly, it later turned out that most of these women had brought along boyfriends.
• Our precinct chair also claimed to be some sort of radio host, and interviewed me briefly. I think my insightful, witty comment was something like "No one has any idea what is supposed to happen here today."
• My precinct's initial vote was 50 to 13 to 4 (Obama, Clinton, Uncommitted). Something happened to two of the uncommitteds, and we never saw them again. People then had to move around and stand with their fellow supporters. Each side was given 5 minutes to make their case for their candidate. It was astonishingly like listening to meet Meet the Press: Obama didn't vote for the war, Hillary has more experience, Obama brings in new voters to the fold, yada yada yada. The idea of "caucusing" is a good one, but at the end of the day no one was particularly persuaded by the arguments of the other side.
• The two uncommitteds who we could find both ended up going to the Obama side.
• Perhaps the most bizarre portion of the event was after the voting was done. In what seemed to be a ploy to get people riled up and start donating money willy-nilly the Chair told us that we were supposed to go around the room and discuss what we didn't like about the current administration. This is like asking people to strike matches in a room full of gasoline. Our precinct voted to save time and skip this, since we all generally agreed there weren't any secret Bush supporters who had infiltrated our caucus.

So that's pretty much it. Frankly, I still prefer easy democracy to hard democracy, and the total events of the day took nearly three hours to complete. And I didn't even get a date out of it.

A caucusing we will go

I like democracy. I'm not so sure that we need to start wars to promote democracy in other places, but it seems to work pretty well here. One of the nice things about democracy is that it's relatively easy: I go somewhere, I vote, someone counts it, done. Sometimes I can mail my ballot in, meaning I don't even have to go somewhere.

But not now.

I got a ballot for the Washington state primary in the mail last week. After the relatively even Super Tuesday results I became excited that my vote would actually count. I filled out my ballot and mailed it in.

And then I found that it would count for exactly nothing.

Turns out that Washington state has both a caucus and a primary. And the primary doesn't count, at least not for the Democrats. And it only kind of counts for the Republicans. So rather than being able to choose my parties candidate from the comfort of my own home I now have to spend some time (one hour? three? ten?) on a Saturday to go stand around and caucus.

I haven't yet decided on a caucus strategy. I'm probably just going to stand around and hope that no one bothers me. But I may also decide to pledge my vote to someone stupid, like Mike Gravel, and start yelling at people who think that Hillary or Obama are the better candidate. Gravel: any man who throws a rock into a pond on YouTube can be my president. Or, I may choose to just walk around and scream "Ca-CAW!" like Gob on Arrested Development. You know, caucus. Ca-CAW! That's comedic genius.