Yesterday was Super Tuesday and since this is the first election in a while where it seems like there aren’t clear cut candidates on each side of the aisle, I thought it would be good to attend our local caucus. I have been a life-long Republican, but my beliefs don’t really fit there these days – I like to refer to myself as a pratical Libertarian (as opposed to most of them who want complete isolationism and anarchy). I decided to attend the Republican caucus since I still have my Republican party card and based on the issues Romney or Paul best fit my beliefs. I have not watched any debates and I’ve paid very little attention to the political news – I’ve been trying to determine my support based solely on the issues.
I tried to talk Katie into coming with me, but she was reluctant to head out – so I had to say I was going to take Amelia before Katie decided she wanted to go. The caucus started at 7 and due to this delay, we didn’t arrive until 7:30. Thank goodness we were late, because when we got to the high school library, we walked into chaos. The tables were filled with people divided up into their township and wards. I went to sit with my ward, but the table was too crowded, so I ended up hovering behind. Apparently, by the time I had gotten there, they had decided who the delegates and alternates were going to be for our Ward. So it took 30 minutes to get that far. I signed some sheet to say I was there, then sat and waited.
There was no organization to this meeting at all. My friend Mike told me as we were picking up our kids from Day Care that he planned on attending, and I was surprised to see he was actually leading the meeting when I got there. I asked him afterward how that happened and he said no one was leading it, so he just picked up the instruction sheet and started to read off what we were supposed to do. I cast my vote on a little piece of white paper that had the five candidates names on it and put it in an envelope. For all that anyone was paying attention, I could’ve had Katie vote too.
During the ensuing 10 minutes of confusion, Katie and I went to the magazine and newspaper section and I paged through a magazine with her. Mike ended up having the honors of announcing the winner for our site which was Paul with 2 more votes than Romney. After a few more wasted minutes, they decided to move into a discussion of the resolutions people wanted to support. A guy I had sat next to briefly on my ward’s table had about 20 pieces of hand-written paper and was starting to go through these resolutions he had written down. At this point I asked Katie if she wanted to go, and she was bored, so we headed out.
When I got home Becky had on CBS and they were going over the primary results from across the country. With as disorganized as our event was, I wondered how they could possibly have results. I had my doubts that our results would even be sent on. Plus, if every caucus operated like ours, the opportunity for corruption or mistakes is very high – I hope we aren’t making decisions about the future of our country that way.
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