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Sunday, February 10, 2008

Caucusing with Jack: A Belated Report

posted by on February 10 at 12:03 PM

All you people who were crammed into mayhem for your caucus: That sucks. My caucus, at a lovely Private Home on Capitol Hill, was crowded (114 people, a record for the Private Home; previous largest Democratic event crowd, 80 people) but highly civilized: Refreshments included several kinds of cookies, satsumas, tea, coffee, and those tiny bottles molded out of chocolate filled with different kinds of liquor. I had Jack Daniels. (All our delegates but one went to Obama. The holdouts included me, my mother, and the oldest, most wonderful lady in America, who during the debate period compared H.R.C. to another of her all-time favorite candidates, Adlai Stevenson.)

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1

Has anyone found a good explanation of why we have a Democratic primary in Washington? I understand there was an initiative back in 1989, but who was behind it and why did they think it made sense to have a primary without any delegates behind it? Or were they hoping that they Democratic party would get behind the primary once it was put into law. Anyone?

Posted by mrcurious | February 10, 2008 12:06 PM
2

Interesting this woman should compare Hillary to Adlai Stevenson. For me, that's a bit off. Hill's way too ruthless.

Ruthless as in, Hillary reminds me of Rasputin. (Which I'm sure Big Sven here would consider a compliment.)

But this does remind me of a recent E.J. Dionne column:

Yet if Clinton's answers come off as well-intended lectures, Obama is offering soaring sermons and generational opportunity. In 1960, the articulate Adlai Stevenson compared his own oratory unfavorably with John F. Kennedy's. "Do you remember," Stevenson said, "that in classical times when Cicero had finished speaking, the people said, 'How well he spoke,' but when Demosthenes had finished speaking, the people said, 'Let us march.' " At this hour, Obama is the Democrats' Demosthenes.

Posted by cressona | February 10, 2008 12:16 PM
3

@1:

Pat Robertson won the GOP caucus in 1988, then his people refused to seat the GOP's version of superdelegates at the state convention. In effect, the religious right completely booted out elected GOP officials from the nomination process.

So those officials led the fight for the initiative that brought us a primary, as a way to check the power of the Robertson supporters. The Democrats never wanted a primary, and have gone back and forth on how many delegates are assigned through it.

The problem this year is that the DNC has a rule prohibiting any primaries or caucuses before February 2 except for Iowa, NH, Nevada, and SC. Because our mail-in voting system does not require voters to state an approved reason for getting a mail-in ballot, it's not considered an absentee system, and the DNC considers the election to be the date ballots are mailed out in early January.

If the state party went ahead with assigning any amount of delegates via the primary, ALL of our delegates would be invalidated, as happened with Michigan and Florida. The state party had no choice but to ignore the primary.

Posted by Cascadian | February 10, 2008 3:33 PM
4

I thought Hillary's all-time favorite candidate was Barry Goldwater.

Posted by NapoleonXIV | February 10, 2008 3:38 PM

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