By K.W. Jeter
I knew the caucuses weren’t going well, even before I found myself sitting across a table from an Obama supporter wearing a shirt that read, I’M SICK OF WHITE BITCHES.
And I didn’t come to my caucus location as a Clinton supporter. Both my wife and I came as Edwards supporters, with a backup plan of switching to Obama if necessary. But for us – and apparently for a lot of other Nevada Democrats – that’s not how it worked out.
The chaos at the caucus locations has already been reported on; that’s a familiar story already, especially to the local Democrats who experienced it firsthand. And of course, it’s being blamed on an unexpectedly large turnout for the caucuses – though it’s a mystery why the state Democratic Party should have been caught flatfooted by exactly the turnout that Harry Reid predicted when he engineered the caucus arrangement for the state.
But one man’s chaos is another man’s opportunity. The rules are in place to protect the minority voices in the party, and when those rules get thrown out the window, what comes back in is old-school Nixon-era machine politics and the specter of possible voter fraud.
When we arrived at our caucus location, we were informed that there was no check-in sheet for our precinct – or, apparently, for several other precincts meeting at that location – as the party organizer with the sheets was a “no show.” (Taking our historic first caucus duties pretty seriously, are we, Democrats?) In that person’s absence, the caucuses were run by Clinton and Obama national campaign organizers – and the first thing they dispensed with was any attempt to verify that the people in the various caucus rooms were even supposed to be there.
Well, fine; we’re all Democrats in this room. No reason to be suspicious – other than that I had already witnessed other people arriving at the caucus location, being seized on by Clinton and Obama organizers and grilled about their preferences – and if the answer wasn’t to the organizers’ liking (i.e., their candidate), being misdirected from the appropriate caucus room. All those stories about people being so frustrated with the process that they gave up and left? That’s probably how that came about.
From about 11 a.m. on, the people who did manage to find their way to the school room where our precinct was supposed to caucus either waited patiently or tried to sort out what was going on. Up until noon, my wife and I were the only Edwards supporters in our precinct room, but we were enough to represent 15 percent of the total caucus attendees, so that Edwards would at least get one delegate from our precinct. There was about a 60-40 split between the Clinton and Obama supporters. At about noon, an organizer from the national Obama campaign came into the room, took a head count of the different groups, then exited. I followed him out into the school corridor and watched him pulling Obama supporters out of the rooms where other precincts were caucusing and sending them into the room where my precinct was caucusing, where they represented themselves as voters from my precinct. None of those additional Obama supporters had been in that caucusing room before then. Were they just hanging out in those other caucus rooms, schmoozing with their friends until vote time came? Sure, that’s possible.
The lack of a sign-in sheet was still troubling to most of the people in the room, so it was proposed that everyone in the room re-register as Democrats from that precinct; because of the laws against fraudulent registration, that would at least have done something to ensure that the people in the room were actually supposed to be there. My wife and myself and the Clinton supporters were willing to do so, and actually did go ahead and fill out the registration forms. Most of the Obama supporters, however, including the ones who had just come into the room, indignantly refused to do so or do anything else to verify their residency in that precinct.
Because of the additional Obama supporters, my wife and I now represented less than 15 percent of the total caucus attendees, so we were informed that our candidate Edward was now "unviable" and we would have to support one of the other two. (Funny that the rule about our not being able to solicit caucus attendees to switch to our candidate – there were some waverers in the Clinton camp – was rigidly enforced by the Clinton and Obama national organizers who had taken charge, but any of that piddly stuff about verifying residency was deemed unnecessary.) We were then aggressively hammered upon by the Obama supporters – but let’s just say that their persuasive techniques didn’t take many hints from How to Win Friends and Influence People, to the point that my wife just picked up and moved over to the Clinton side. I tore up my registration form and preference card and refused to take any further part in such a patently unfair political process.
Just a one-off personal snit on my part? Apparently not; a friend and fellow Edwards supporter at another caucus location told me afterwards that most of the other Edwards supporters wound up folding their arms and refusing to be logrolled into voting for either Clinton or Obama. Even the Review-Journal, amazingly eager to carry the bucket for the state Democratic Party’s claim that the caucuses were a big success, managed to note that at the Bellagio’s at-large caucus, “There were 33 Edwards supporters or uncommitted voters who didn’t join either [the Clinton or Obama] camp” – obviously because they didn’t like the stink of election-rigging that those candidates’ tactics had raised in the room. Not the least of which was, of course, the widely reported abuses by the Culinary Union’s leaders, lying to their own membership and attempting to bully them into supporting Obama. Is there a way of arranging a gold medal for courage for all the CU members who told their union rep’s where they could shove the union’s hand-picked candidate?
After eight years of George Bush, the Clinton and Obama campaigns might figure the Democrats have a lock on the White House, and that all that matters is ramming their candidate through the nominating process, and if it takes dirty political tricks to accomplish that, then that’s how a hard-ball game is played. But there’s a good chance that the margin of victory they’re counting on isn’t so wide that the party can afford, this early on, to start slicing away significant chunks of its support, hoping that their candidate will be the last one standing at the convention.
Beyond 2008, the Democratic Party needs to scrap the caucus system, with all its obvious potential for abuse, and return to a secret ballot primary that prevents the kind of bullying and pressure tactics that we just witnessed here in Nevada. If caucusing is the price of getting moved up in the primary season schedule, so we can be pandered to by candidates who will conveniently forget their promises as soon as they’re in office – it’s not worth it. This party needs to let its voters vote – or go ahead and take the word “Democratic” out of its name.