A bit about our caucus experience

It is too bad the reporting could not be as civil as the process was at out voting site. We had six precincts. I was the precinct captain for Obama, and the first thing I did was have a conversation with the Clinton precinct captain. We had three Obama caucus captains - who had Clinton secretaries - and three Clinton captains - who had Obama secretaries. Our overriding concern was to make the process such that everyone knew it was fair. After the final precinct finished, we made copies of all the documents, so that I had a complete set and the Clinton captain did too. The individual caucus captains called in the results, and I called the Obama campaign with the results, as I assume the other captain did as well. I had the microphone most of the night trying to get 500 people organized in an elementary school cafeteria, and what I said over and over was that we really are on the same team here, and we need to be sure we send Noriega to the Senate and a Democrat to the White House. The simple fact of the matter is that Bush did win in 2000. The rules of the game affect the way the game is played. If we didn't have the electoral college, perhaps Bush spends the last two weeks running through the South drumming up more votes where he was going to win anyway, and Gore does the same in New England. Who knows what would have happened if there had been no electoral college? The campaign would have been so significantly different that we will never know. Similarly, down here this week, I spent all of my time on Monday and Tuesday talking to Obama voters trying to get them back to the caucus. My targeted audience was people who had already voted and indicated they had voted for Obama. In a normal primary, I would have scratched them off and not contacted them again until October and instead tried to focus on undecided voters who hadn't yet been to the polls. The mistake the media made was not in reporting that Clinton won the Texas primary since she did - their mistake was in making these sound like significant wins when they were certainly not in delegate terms. We won't know the results of the Texas caucus until March 29 at the earliest because all results are unofficial until they are certified at the county conventions. But from what I have read and seen at the Texas Democratic party page, it would be shocking for the results to be any closer than 37-30 for Obama, and the highest total for the primary for Clinton would be 66-60. The bottom line for me is if there had just been a primary or just been a caucus, the strategy taken by both sides would have been significantly different.