Thank You, Seattle, For Participating In Obama Caucus 2008

We walked into our caucus location -- a hot, overcrowded elementary school with signs that said "Welcome to the First Grade" -- as an undecided voter, and two and a half hours later walked out as an undecided voter, but with a deeper appreciation of democracy.

Not that it made much difference in real-world terms. Our precinct (189 people turned out) went heavily Obama, which we understand is how the wind blew in Seattle today.

But we learned a lot. We learned that democracy involves standing around for a long time, while people come by and say things are about to happen that may or may not be true. We learned that CHAC's Matthew Kwatinetz got there in someone else's car. His had broken down in Madrona, and when he went to see if he could still participate in their caucus, someone there he didn't know gave him their car to borrow.

We also learned that we're glad the Stranger's Dan Savage wasn't in our precinct after all:

Yeah, yeah: The caucus system is supposed to build community, or something, since we’re all supposed to gather together with our neighbors and talk about who we’re supporting and why, and make appeals to the braindeads—excuse me, the undecideds—blah blah blah.

We'll put our grubby SAT scores up against the learned Dr. Savage's any day, but we mainly want to mention that the experience did build community, and did create civic engagement. Our undecided group was the smallest, after the die-hard Clinton supporters. We had Obama people deliver good reasons to vote Obama, we had Clinton people deliver good reasons to vote Clinton.

But the ten hardy, indecisive souls who stuck around could not be swayed. We all felt either candidate had strong points and weak points: while Clinton came with divisive baggage, she also came with accomplishments. While Obama came with hope and inspiration, he also came untested as yet by the Republican machine. While we all agreed we wanted a Democrat who could win, none of us felt we really knew enough to commit to one candidate or the other.

After finding out that we could elect an "undecided" delegate from our number to send on, we stood outside in the cold and huddled up. We all spoke about what criteria might most affect our preference in the future; people spoke simply, directly, about what mattered most to them.

We voted on who would be our delegate. We were split down the middle, so we flipped a coin and called it good.