Yesterday morning, because my life hasn’t been busy enough the last while, I woke up, got my shit together, and then went down to the 37th precinct. My district went fairly strongly for Obama (6:1 or 8:1), and I was an alternate delegate for Obama. I figured to go and see what was happening, and it was generally a good time, but long. I generally don’t talk much about my personal beliefs here, but someone asked me to put up this writeup that I originally put in a public forum.
Act I: the beginning (1 hour)
The first hour was spent registering for my precinct, and then sitting in the bleachers waiting for things to happen. I noticed something in particular, which was that a lot of the Clinton delegates who showed up were fairly hostile, which was strange, and generally about 10 years older than I was. This (the age) was a surprise, because at my precinct caucus, the people who showed up were more or less demographically indistinguishable from any other crowd of seattleites. The Obama delegates had about the same number of people of that age, but it was if the Clinton campaign only took that demographic. (This is, of course, a generalization and completely anecdotal evidence.)
I had a lot of fun talking to a delegate (for Clinton) that I knew from a company I worked at several years ago. I also made some new friends who were also Obama delegates. At the precinct level, there were a lot of people who I knew through their involvement in the Seattle tech community. The only person I saw from my precinct at the district caucus was a really bad Clinton delegate whose speech at the precinct caucus switched a bunch of people over to Obama.
Act II: the interlude (2 hours)
A lot of the second act was spent writing email on my iPhone to various people, because not a lot was happening. A record number of people wanted to be delegates for Obama at the next level (around 500, one announcement said), which was a number that was past unprecedented and into WTF? areas. I spent a bunch of time talking to the union organizer who was there (because I was in UAW for a while (graduate assistants at the UW), I got a nifty UNION DELEGATE sticker.)
We had a bunch of speakers during this time. A lot of the judges that we have the opportunity to vote for came up and spoke. We also had Ed Murray, our district’s state senator talk for a while, which is always fun. Ed Murray is my favorite Seattle politician because he always brings up his ties to minority communities by stressing that his fiancee (male) of 17 years is Asian. Most Seattle/Washington politicians at least once you get past the Seattle level are mostly Irish, and their attempts to connect to the whole crowd are frequently bizarre logic jumps. (My ancestry is mostly also Scots and Irish, I just hate bad logic.)
Also speaking was Jim McDermott, whose speech was essentially ‘My colleagues in Washington are always amazed by the fact that I keep acting like an ultraliberal freak and you people keep sending me back. But that’s why you do it, Right?’ … the crowd then goes wild, which it generally does when he says things like this. This is a true thing he is saying, they don’t call this the People’s Republic of Washington for nothing, folks.
Eventually, the mass crowds died out and they processed everyone through. I was in the last group of alternates to be called out of the ‘alternate and guest bleachers,’ the methodology for this strangely resembled The Price Is Right.
Act III: Dramatis Personae & Exeunt Omnes (1 hour)
As I was walking over to my credentials check across the high school gym, the announcer called out that Sean Astin was in the crowd and would be addressing the audience. I’d been getting ‘dodgeballs’ that ‘Sam’ was at other caucuses, but there was a lot of idiot SMS traffic that day and I was more or less ignoring it. But, Sean Astin came out to speak on behalf of Hilary Clinton. However, by the time he reached our crowd, all the delegates but me and about 30 other people were already seated in the other room.
I walked over to the auditorium where the delegates were sitting, and it was so packed that I ended up sitting outside and chatting with my friends Eric K (Clinton) and Brian W (Obama). Eric has been a perpetual nuisance on the local burningman-bcwa lists with his strident Clinton cheering, which I only object to when he’s just promulgating media spin and not giving his own opinions. So, I chatted with them for about an hour. Mostly, we just talked about the event and the day, because we both know the others well enough to know that we’re all fixed in opinion.
Act IV: Performance Art and Resolution (1.5 hours or more)
Eventually, the Obama delegates left the clinton delegates in the auditorium and went back to the gym (because it was bigger), and each delegate who wanted to go on to the state level got 30 seconds to describe their qualifications to go. Lots of people spoke, but I think the total list was only about 100 - 200 rather than the original 500. So, people spoke about why they should go, some were funny, some were insightful, some were strident. After a really long time, we got our delegate voting sheets and I voted for the people I thought should go and then left. I missed some of the speakers, but I had said I’d actually get work done today. I think I selected a good range of people, but I was also pretty damn tired by this point.
My overall thoughts on the process is that the Obama campaign seems to be so successful here that it’s actually overwhelming the machinery of the democratic party through the amount of turnout it’s causing. Things that would usually just be a short exercise by the party faithful are getting many times the normal turnout. This doesn’t seem to be a plan on the Obama campaign’s part, it’s just occasioning such high turnouts and enthusiasm that the small number of volunteers that would typically suffice for these things are getting overrun.