Watching Paint Dry in Iowa

Since Mr. Random now works for a Random Publication, watching the Iowa Caucuses is now kind of part of his job. Last night we settled in for a cozy evening of C-SPAN and C-SPAN2.

Thoughts about last night:

**I must preface this by stating that I was involved in local Democratic politics for a bunch of years, so watching the workings of one of the Des Moines precincts gave me flashbacks to too many long party meetings and caucuses. It’s funny that all the casts of characters for the local Dem parties look AND sound the same, no matter where you are in the country. Watching the Des Moines people gather and organize and persuade and count and go over resolutions, I was like, whoa! I knew exactly what types of resolutions would be offered and how people would respond pro and con. It was scary . . .

**I know that us Dems are all about inclusiveness and making sure that everyone gets a say, but you know, you can be inclusive AND efficient. Watching people try to count off once they were in their little interest groups was just painful. Couldn’t people take a number when they decided on a group, just like a deli, and the last number be the count? “23, 24, 24, 25, 26 . . . oops, wait, let’s start again! Count off one by one . . .” The hand-raising thing was only slightly better.

**I felt really bad for the Richardson people. At the precinct that was being filmed, the groups needed at least 57 to be considered “viable” and at one point the Richardson group had 47. The woman who was one of the organizers for the Richardson group was a master to behold in the art of persuasion, but some of her other helpers didn’t seem to be as committed as she, and their group started losing people as soon as it was obvious that Clinton, Obama and Edwards were going to be the more viable choices. At the end of the evening, C-SPAN interviewed her and she looked like she was about to burst into tears at any moment. My heart went out to her – I have been in her place SO often – it breaks your heart to work for so long for someone, giving up your life for months and months, staying up for hours on end, knocking on doors, talking to all sorts of people, doing all sorts of mindless grunt-work, all for a candidate you believe in . . . and then to lose at the very end, all of your work seemingly for naught, by a really close margin – they just needed 10 more people! – it hurts SO much, I can barely describe it. I was happy to see that she remained uncommitted at the end because she really didn’t want any other candidate. It takes a while to process what just happened and figure out what to do next – I wish I could have reached through the screen to give her a really big hug and some support. I do hope some family or friends were nearby . . .

**Good luck to the people who volunteered to be delegates to their county-level Democratic Convention. I’ve been to those before. That’s 8 hours of your life that you’ll never get back again . . .

**Its great that Iowa had much higher turnout of new people for their caucuses this year, even though the process is a big pain in the butt and isn’t even representative of all Iowa’s voters. What I hate about the caucus process as practiced in Iowa is that it isn’t a secret ballot. It can be intimidating to show your preferences in front of everyone you know, and maybe if it was a secret ballot and people weren’t so caught up in being seen with a winning group, there might have been a different outcome.

**Did you know that Wyoming is having its caucuses this Saturday? It wouldn’t surprise me if you didn’t because I didn’t know either and hardly anyone is campaigning there – all the energy is going towards the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday . . .

Oy, this is going to be a very long election year. I’m probably not going to watch all of these primaries and caucuses – I’m probably going to end up holed up at my desk with homework or a book or something, thank goodness . . .