Washington State Caucus

My friend Tamara in Texas, along with other friends had been concerned that I wasn't going to "Barack the Vote" because they had all heard me voice my disappointment that he was going for the presidential prize. Not because I don't think he's great, cause I do, but I felt like he was doing a fabulous job as a senator, and was happy to vote for him when he ran against Alan Keyes for that job. I was also scared to see a man that I consider to be a very rare bright spot in American politics drug through the mud.

So I went to my district caucus today and sat in a very crowded room of excited people. Here is a bit that I sent to Tamara describing it:

It was very interesting. Since community is so hard to come by now-a-days it was really interesting to see how excited people were to talk to their neighbors. The place was totally packed, which isn't saying much cause it wasn't a big space. There was a woman there who had caucused in that same precinct many times and she recalled having once been the only person to show up. Today there were almost 100, so that is pretty telling about how this election is going to play out. People are excited, especially here. Since Washington's votes rarely matter this much in the primary.

There is an overwhelming amount of activity on the local blogs now. Everybody is relating their experience. All sound pretty similar. Excited people in crowded rooms.

Here is a picture from my precinct, and here.

Here are some thoughts from my neighbor Christopher Frizzelle who is an editor at The Stranger:

Man, that was confusing and crowded and hot. There were way more people stuffed into those rooms than those rooms can hold, and finding your precint line was total chaos. First you had to look on a map to see what number your precint was, but 300 people crowding around a map the size of a regular piece of paper taped up onto a wall is, uh, suboptimal. Plus, soon as you’d fought your way to the front to see the map, the streets were all faint and illegible—no wonder it had taken forever for other people to get the information they needed and get out of the way. Then—then!—you had to find your aforementioned precint line, and were the numbers in order along the wall? No! They went, like, 1867, 1868, 1945, 1901, 1888, 1950, etc. And the halls were so crowded you couldn’t move.

I’m so with you, Dan. But whatever—our precinct sent 5 delegates for Obama and 1 for Hillary. Five to one. I was happy.

Apparently he was trying to get the rest of the people on our floor together to go to the caucus by bribing them with fruit. I was already on my way over there when he was knocking on doors, so I didn't get an orange.