1) YOU THOUGHT IT WAS UGLY THIS TIME? JUST WAIT.
The state Democratic Party and its rah-rah fanboys in the local media are eager to bury the recently concluded carcass—sorry; I meant caucus—in a shallow grave, before the aroma of its rapid decomposition pollutes the official line of its having been a great success. Of course, bragging about the number of people who took part in a disaster such as this is like saying, “Well, yes, the Titanic sank—but at least there were a lot of people aboard.”
We might have already witnessed the high point of Democratic caucus attendance, though. Enough people have precious memories of how they were treated in the process for them to rationally decide that if they’re going to get screwed, they might as well do it at home, where there’s beer in the fridge.
It’s the folks with simmering, stewing memories of dirty tricks on the part of both the front-runners’ campaigns, and who have resolved to be there for the 2012 caucus, if there is one, who are going to drag the party’s soiled linen out into the open like never before. The relative success of those dirty tricks—the conveniently missing sign-in sheets, the shuffling of attendees with unverified addresses in and out of precinct rooms at the last minute before head counts and all the other blithe disregard of caucus rules—depended upon people being not only unprepared for the tactics of the out-of-state Obama and Clinton shock troops, but also expecting an election procedure less consistent with a ballot-stuffing banana republic. If there’s a 2012 caucus, you’ll be able to count on people not only being ready for skulduggery, cell-phone cameras and video recorders poised to document every violation and hotline numbers memorized, but also ready to bar the caucus doors to anyone not willing to throw a current Nevada ID down on the table.
2) IS THIS REALLY WHAT HARRY REID WANTS ON HIS TOMBSTONE?
Confusion happens; we all know that. And contra our local newspapers and TV news, the chaos at the Democratic caucus locations isn’t what people are bitching about. The real gripe is with those front-runner campaign organizations who were suspiciously well-prepared and eager to take advantage of that confusion, either by “packing” caucus locations or, as with the at-large caucus locations on the Strip, using the lack of a secret ballot to turn the process into a public pressure cooker, with Culinary Union reps attempting to hammer heroically stubborn union members into climbing on board the Obama bandwagon.
Which raises the question: What exactly was the intention of the person whose signature is all over the Nevada Democratic caucus? Granted, Nevada doesn’t have a deep association with secret-ballot primaries, but it never mattered before. Well, news flash for Harry Reid: Moving Nevada up in the primaries schedule still doesn’t make us matter. Until the Republicans succeed in cratering the U.S. economy to the point that everybody has moved here, looking for jobs in the casinos, we don’t have the numbers to be anything more than chump change in the delegate count. All Nevadans got out of an earlier slot was phone spam on our answering machines and TV commercials about an indefinable substance called “change.” Oh, and voter fraud, which is pretty much what you can expect when you don’t have a secret ballot. The secret ballot was invented—not that long ago—to prevent exactly what we saw during the Democratic caucus.
The push starts now to abandon the caucus system. If Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders don’t sign on, they’re going to confirm a lot of people’s suspicions that opening up the state’s election process to Nixon-era dirty tricks is what Reid & Co. actually want.
3) RACIAL BLOC VOTING? “BRING IT,” SAYS DAVID DUKE.
Actually, the onetime Klan politician and still-active éminence grise of the white separatist movement hasn’t said that yet—not in relation to the ’08 presidential campaign, at least—but he will. African-Americans voting en masse for Obama gives Duke and his kind the final talking point they need to fill the hand they want to lay down in front of white voters. In a state such as Nevada, with its demographics shifting on a daily basis, the prospects for unity could grow as dim as in those other states from which people are fleeing.
A big chunk of the punditocracy has declared that Obama’s campaign has made this the first “race transcendent” U.S. election. If only that were true. Instead, it’s shaping up as the first “affirmative action” election, to use a phrase that’s fallen out of favor in today’s D-word era.
If times were as flush as they were when Bill Clinton was president, race and even gender might not have been issues at all. But with household finances the way they are now, for a lot of melanin-challenged male voters, this election plays out as a not-very-funny joke: “A white guy, a black guy and a woman apply for the same job. Guess which one’s out of the running.” Many of the same pundits and columnists eager to dismiss Edwards’ campaign as not being as “historic” as those other two also grudgingly concede that he’s actually the best candidate of all three—as The New York Times’ arch-liberal columnist Paul Krugman put it, “The sequence has been that Edwards comes out with the plan first, he pushes the envelope on how progressive you can be. And then the base likes it, and the public doesn’t seem to be disturbed, so several months later Obama basically matches what Edwards has done, and a couple months after that Hillary Clinton more or less matches what Edwards has done. Edwards has been forcing the pace on the progressive agenda.”
In the Nevada caucuses, race issues didn’t raise their ugly head—or at least didn’t seem to—as sharply as they have elsewhere. Spin-doctoring aside, in the South Carolina Democratic primary Obama won over three-quarters of the black voters while losing over three-quarters of the white voters. Obama actually got a higher percentage of white voters back when he ran in Iowa. How “transcendent” is that? If anything, the racial split has grown deeper since the beginning of the campaign. If Nevada’s numbers were less indicative of race-based voting, it’s mainly because of the much smaller percentages of nonwhite voters here. The divide exists; it’s just not as apparent—yet.
The problem with racially Balkanized politics, with voters dividing on essentially genetic lines, is that things—for everybody—get real ugly, real fast. David Duke and his waiting-in-the-wings surrogates would love to be able to take the stats on Obama’s overwhelming percentage of the black vote and say, “Look—they stick together. Why don’t we?” Instead of everybody sitting around a post-racial campfire singing “Kumbaya,” the tune becomes a variation on Thomas Hobbes’ grim Latin motto, Bellum omnem contra omnes—the war of each tribe against all the others.
It’s a realpolitik maxim equivalent to the law of gravity that alliances, when they do form in a plurality, are in the nature of a smaller dog hooking up with the biggest dog in the yard, not with another dog close to its same size. What happened at the at-large Democratic caucuses shows that Hispanic voters are going to exercise their perfect right to cut whatever deals suit them—which here meant going for Clinton rather than Obama—rather than necessarily enlisting in a grand “everybody but the really pale people” coalition.
But, of course, African-Americans have a perfect right, as well, to support whomever they want. All choices have consequences, though; on the far side of 2012, we could be reviewing our own, wondering how they led us to such bleak territory, in which race is not only still an issue in politics, but possibly the biggest issue.
But that’s way in the future. In the meantime, let’s at least get rid of these stupid caucuses.
K.W. Jeter is a local freelance writer.