Another District, Another Caucus

There's an old saying about how politics is like making sausage and how no one wants to watch that. Turns out that watching 2,000 people try to pass a party platform and resolutions is not all that fun. Thankfully we figured that out before we tried to sign up to run as a delegate for the next level.

While the Credentials Committee figured out how many delegates would be allocated to each candidate, the crowd listened to speeches by surrogates for the two candidates (Kucinich and Edwards didn't get a chance for some reason. Neither did Undecideds.) Like Seattlest Kim, we have no idea why Hilary sent Sean Astin to speak for her. Maybe the large number of tech folks in this city made them think we'd respond to an actor who was in Lord of the Rings? Obama's campaign sent four surrogates: a 70-something woman, a man of color, a white woman and of course, a new, young voter. They got cut off when they ran longer than their alloted three minutes.

There were also speeches for local office (we have an open seat in the State House for the first time in 36 years), some speeches from a few elected officials and a debate over the District's Party Platform (Word Doc). We're pretty sure we would love the process of putting that document together and may start attending the regular meetings so we can be involved in the future. Yesterday though, the time for tweaking its wording was long past and we found it pretty annoying to have to listen to other Johnny-Come-Latelies like us try to change little bits and pieces of it and the six resolutions we also voted on.

The most exciting part of yesterday's caucus came when both a voice vote and a show of hands vote on the sixth resolution about publicly financed elections (pdf) were too close to call. At that point, the Chair of the Caucus decided to call it a tie which she said meant the measure failed. That led us to think we were in the home stretch of the day until someone in the crowd stood to call for "division" on the question, which meant they wanted a full count of every vote, by hand. The Chair, like us, seemed none to pleased with the prospect of making that happen, but somehow did. The resolution ended up passing by less than 100 votes, which seemed to please the chair and thus us. (She did such a great job of herding us cats that we ended up on her side of everything.)

In the end, the part of the caucus we were there for, allocating delegates between Hillary and Obama to the next level, came and went in the blink of an eye. Almost 80 percent of the delegates signed in in support of Obama, leaving a bit more than 20 percent for Hillary. She got about 15 delegates to the County Convention, while Obama got 52 from the 36th, which we learned yesterday has more registered Democrats than any other district in Seattle. (Take THAT Capitol Hill!)