prairie point

You may recall that I attended my precinct caucus after the March 4 Texas primary and was sent as a delegate to our county convention. Our precinct selected 6 delegates - 5 for Clinton and 1 for Obama - to the county convention.

Saturday morning I drove down to the county courthouse and participated in the second stage of the process. Our precinct delegation was grouped with delegates from 5 other precincts to make a mini-caucus to select one delegate to the state convention. Remember that at this point you are voting for a delegate to represent you, not for a presidential candidate. And quite a few people who have come this far in the process would like to be a delegate, myself included. Also the person who comes in second gets to go as the alternate. So its theoretically possible for a person who is in the minority to wind up as one of the top two vote-getters. Our group was 16 to 2 in favor of Clinton though, so I knew right away that no amount of politickin’ or strategizin’ was going to overcome those odds.

There were 7 other little mini-caucuses like ours that chose just one delegate each. All but two groups were very lop-sided for Clinton and one of those actually had a majority for Obama but they wound up being out-maneuvered in a close vote.

The county was entitled to a ninth delegate also, who was to be chosen at-large by the nominating committee. The county chair explained that they would try to balance the delegation somewhat when they chose that delegate. And they did need to balance it because not only was the elected delegation all-Clinton, it was also 100% white and 88% female. So it was no surprise they chose the black male Obama supporter who had come close to being elected in the one group.

The whole process was very orderly and lasted a couple hours, unlike what was being reporting for the big cities. There were a few surprises. One was how heavily female the delegations were. Our “mini-caucus” for instance was 13 women to 5 men, and that was typical. They were not all old people either, as the press seems to make out. There were a lot of younger, very vocal Hillary women.

The Obama people were mostly blacks from a couple precincts in the one little small town we have in the county. Many of them wore suits and ties and Easter Sunday dresses, while the white folks dressed like farmers and ranchers, which a lot of them actually were. It reminded me of the courtroom scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The old white guys who were running the show were all Clinton people - Clinton after all is the “establishment” candidate in this game - and they seemed to patronize Obama as a “race” candidate in my mind.

The main thing I learned from this experience was how easily your voice can get extinguished when you are in the minority. Although the popular vote in the county had split 72-28, the minority came very close to having no representation at all in the final count. Even so it was under-represented. The only consolation is that the scene played out in favor of the opposite side in many other county conventions.