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At the Kansas Caucuses

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Last Tuesday I had little idea what a caucus actually was as I drove through a snowstorm to my official caucus location at Gardner/Edgerton High School. I had heard vague stories when Iowa had theirs about small groups of people casting ballots in someone’s living room. It was nothing like that. It was much more like a high school pep rally.

I arrived just after the doors opened at 7 p.m. and I still had to wait in line 30 minutes. By the time I made it to the front, the line was out the front door with dozens more standing out in the snowstorm waiting to get in. One of the organizers told me that in 2004 they had 40 people show up. This year they expected 200. By the time they closed the doors at 8 p.m. there were more than 900 people inside and many more were turned away — all in a snowstorm!

I took a seat in the auditorium near the front. They asked you to choose a section to sit in based on which candidate you preferred. I chose Barack Obama’s section. I will not turn my site into yet another political blog, so the only speech-ifying I’ll make is to say that I chose him after reading endorsements from Lawrence Lessig and Randall Munroe who both care about most of the same Internet issues that I do.

The crowd had been sporadically breaking out into chants in support of their candidates. One section of the auditorium would begin chanting “HILL - A - RY, HILL- A- RY” over and over which elicited an equivalent “O - BAM - A, O - BAM - A” from another section. It was cute at first, but after almost an hour it began to grow tiresome. At 8:20 p.m. our Caucus leader made an announcement that there were still a few hundred people whose registrations weren’t processed and that they expected that the Caucus wouldn’t begin until after 9 p.m.

The chants started again, but you could feel the crowd fatigue. I told some of the people who were sitting around me (whom I had gotten to know well over the past hour) that we needed to change the tempo to get the audience engaged. A guy wearing a much-loved K-State ballcap sitting in the next row told me to get off my can and do it myself. So I did.

I had the front of the Obama section chant “Ba-Rack” and answered by the back of the auditorium with “O-Bam-A”. I ran up and down the aisles pumping my fists and shouting with the crowd. We did that for a few cycles and it effectively cut off the Hillary people. Always end with a rousing applause/cheer when you sense the audience losing energy during a chant, by the way. It caps the cheer off nicely and gives a sense of accomplishment, as corny as that sounds. The Obama campaign organizers loved it.

Around 8:45 p.m. I had a new idea. I borrowed the University of Kansas Rock Chalk chant but changed the words to “Baaa - raaaack ---- O Bammmm aaaaa” followed by a fervent cheer. I wish I had it on video. I was going up and down the aisles leading about 500 to 600 people in what sounds like a battalion of monks in a church. They went wild.

I tried other things, too. I grabbed one of the Hillary leaders and began a “No More Bush” chant that brought everyone together in a common cause. By the time the Caucus started at 9:30 p.m. I was pretty tired, but everyone in the Obama camp near me congratulated me. That’s when one woman said to me, “you should run for Delegate.” More on that in a minute.

We proceeded with the Caucus by counting off everyone in the auditorium, in each of the candidate’s sections, one by one. The results were tallied and Barack Obama won with over 70 percent of the vote. Now this is Gardner, Kansas - it’s predominantly rural and white. For Obama to do as well as he did and to hear the praise put on him by what I call the Wal-Mart crowd is pretty amazing.

The Caucus ended at 10:15 p.m. Everyone was thanked and the announcement was made that if you wanted to run for Delegate to the State Convention then you could stay and make a speech to be followed by a vote. Because of the vote breakdown, Obama would get 8 delegates and Hillary 4 from our district. Of Obama’s eight, four men and four women would be selected. I had no idea what any of this meant.

About 40-45 people stayed to run for delegate. There was the county prosecutor, the baptist minister, the pediatrician who worked in impoverished neighborhoods, the State Senator, the retired naval aviator, the firefighter, the guy who organized and ran the caucus, three high school teachers, the poli-sci kid from the community college, a School Board member who had just switched from the Republican party that night, a dozen others, and me.

We all gave speeches and got to vote for four people. Long story short - I won. I’ll be a delegate to the State Convention on April 12th.

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