Today is Democratic caucus day in Washington. So, as loyal supporters of democracy we trudged up to Broadview Community Church and joined in the fun of the precinct 46-2540 caucus. For the record, before today I was a dissident Republican, someone who likes strong fiscal policy, a minimum of deficit, and believes that keeping American business strong and competitive means greater prosperity for all. I also have a mild socialist streak in some things, but by nature I have always favored public-private partnerships. Problem is that while I haven't moved politically in the last eight years, the GOP has. I feel like I went to bed in Danzig and woke up in Gdansk. So, I took my support for Edwards and my conservative leaning to the caucus.
Of course, the idiot I was, I grabbed all the paperwork and instantly became the presiding officer. Bad move. I haven't cracked a copy of Robert's Rules of Order since student council in high school. This -- and the difficulty in understanding the instructions -- would lead to a major error on my part, one I'm still kicking myself for making. (As an aside, the precinct captain had to explain to the 150+ people gathered what a sanctuary was. Washington state has the lowest average church attendance in America, and it was quite obvious today.)
Anyway, we had 16 show up. I should note that we live in a small, small precinct -- eight North Seattle square blocks, between 60-70 houses, population around 200. You could beat the bounds in 15 minutes. 16 was actually a pretty small number. We were, at 33, 31, and -2 months, the 2 2/3rds youngest people in the room. But I'm still digressing.
After some attempts to explain the rules (canvas vote, final vote, horse trading, the threshold), we proceeded with the first "canvas" vote.
Kerry - 5
Kucinich - 5
Edwards - 3
Dean - 2
Uncommitted - 1
Thus began the horse trading. One Dean supporter, feeling that his statement had been made, switched to Kucinich. The other one switched to Kerry. Every had the opportunity to make their case to everyone in the room; it was more a classic Seattle neighborhood coffee klatch than an organized meeting. The Kucinich people, feeling that Kerry was the de facto nominee, wanted to make a statement and hung together. After some discussion, one member of the group said that he had to be somewhere else at 11am, so we went straight to the second vote. (At this point came rule suspension #1: The group agreed, by assent, to a voice vote rather than secret ballot.)
Kerry - 6
Kucinich - 6
Edwards - 4
And here was my mistake: I misread the rules on what the minimum number of people needed to create a delegate. 15% of 16 should be 3, but due to a misread of the chart included in my packet, I thought it was 6. Thus, instead of it being one apiece to Kerry/Kucinich/Edwards, we suspended the rules for the second time and held another vote, but not before suspending the rules a third time and allowing the guy who needed to leave to cast a proxy vote. Heck, nothing secret, remember, because we had already dumped that rule.
The third and final vote:
Kerry - 8
Kucinich - 6
Edwards - 2
Thus, Kerry sent two delegates, Kucinich one, and Edwards left with nothing... but he didn't have to, and it took me til three hours after we adjourned before I realized my mistake. I had two excuses. The process was rushed, so I didn't get a good opportunity to read through the rules and understand how the formulae for computing delegates worked. My other excuse is that the instructions didn't make a lick of sense -- there weren't any, honestly, only rules. There was a chart that listed the FACTOR by which you multiplied the votes to determine delegates, and I misunderstood it to mean DELEGATES.
So, Sen. Edwards, I'm really sorry. My incompetence cost you a delegate. Dr. Dean, don't come looking at me, because, honestly, you had two supporters, both of whom abandoned their positions within five seconds of the completion of vote one.
We had a brief discussion of the Democratic values statement, then 46-2540 adjourned. The only thing we agreed on was that Dubya has been a disaster of a president and needs to go.
(A number of other Seattle people are blogging on their caucuses.)
Comments
-
Interesting - our precinct meeting had one very fleeting reference to "foreign policy" the word Iraq was never used.
Posted by: pops | February 7, 2004 07:42 PM
-
It's a good thing you didn't rip off Dean. I hear he can be quite excitable.
I wouldn't worry about Edwards.
Posted by: JD Mays | February 7, 2004 07:53 PM
