Experience Over Change

March 5th, 2008 in Dipdive in Texas by Hillel Aron

I drove to San Antonio last night to watch a caucus. I was expecting a crazy scene, but what I saw was nuttier than anything I could have imagined.

The first thing I saw as I approached the San Antonio Central Library was this guy:

He was standing alone, no one but me and him within 50 yards.

“RON PAUL FOR AMERICA!” he shouted, his voice echoing off the art deco walls. “RON PAUL FOR REVOLUTION! RETURN TO THE CONSTITUTION! RETURN TO THE GOLD STANDARD! RON PAUL FOR AMERICA!”

And so on. He had quite a voice.

I went into the Library and found a crowd of people waiting to get in. It was 7:30, and the doors were supposed to have opened at 7:00. People were upset.

The woman on the far right in the picture above didn’t want to vote for Barack Obama because he, in her words, “used to be a Muslim.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“That’s what I read,” she said.

In fact, there were all sorts of characters at this caucus. It’s a bad picture, but this guy looked just like John Locke from Lost, only with a goatee.

And then there was Ruby, the surprisingly well-informed transvestite.

Ok, he might have been a she, or there may have been some sort of operation involved. It’s not really for me to say.

Ruby was, however, a dedicated Hillary supporter.

There was also a really cool short Mexican guy named Fernando. But my favorite person was Rebecca Potts.

Rebecca is a senior in high school, soon to be attending Pomona College. She was incredibly smart and obviously an over-achiever, but not in an annoying Tracy Flick kind of way, more in a hipster-nerd kind of way. She’d been posted out in front of the library as an Obama volunteer. For some reason, she had her heart set on being precinct chair. This is an elected position that is in charge of running the caucus. It is completely devoid of prestige and involves getting 100 or so grumpy strangers to do what you tell them to do. But Rebecca was in some sort of government class, and seemed bent on getting her first taste of elected office.

When talking about how bad she wanted to be precinct chair, she could hardly contain herself. She kept shifting about nervously.

Finally, they let us in to the room- the modern art room of the library. And a problem immediately became clear: no one was in charge. They needed a temporary chair. This is supposed to be just anyone, but it turned out that more people than Rebecca wanted the job, including Ruby and the lady who thought Obama used to be a Muslim.

Some guy devised a system of coin flips, like the NCAA basketball tournament- you two flip a coin, then you two, then the two winners flip, and so on. Miraculously, Rebecca won. She was delighted.

But she soon realized that she had inherited a quagmire. There were 100 people in this room of terrible modern art, and they all needed to be signed in. In order to vote in the caucus, you have to have voted in the primary (this has already been acknowledged as the dumbest system ever).

So Rebecca and some others pulled some tables over and started signing people in.

(I don’t think this painting would have gone over very well in the Republican caucus.)

What formed was a giant mass of people, all upset that they had been kept waiting, wanting to get the show on the road already. Rebecca tried to maintain order by starting more and more lines, but it looked like she had a revolution on her hands. This sour-faced lady kept calling for a vote on a permanent chair.

That, by the way, is the sunniest expression she had the whole night.

The main problem was that there was so much to write down when signing in: your name, address, phone number, e-mail, who you wanted to vote for, and your 10 digit voter number, which appears on your voter registration card. A news crew from CBS was filming the madness with their mouths wide open in astonishment. I started talking with the on-air guy, who deemed the scene “fucking amazing.”

There were about a dozen people that helped out, formed new lines, and picked up the pace a bit. By 8:15, everyone was signed in. The angry woman again called for a vote on the permanent chair.

There was a bit of confusion as to whether the permanent chair was elected before or after the votes were counted. Everyone started to shout their two cents, including Ruby, who amazingly had the rules in her giant backpack and informed the angry mob that they first had to elect a permanent chair, than count the votes.

Rebecca was nominated. So was Ruby. And so was some old guy named Carl.

Dramatically, Ruby dropped out of the race at the last minute. Carl, it turned out, was a Hillary supporter. Ruby, well-informed as she was, seemed to think that it was good for Hillary if the precinct chair was a Hillary supporter. When pressed, she said she wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t want the Hillary vote split.

“Raise your hand if you want to vote for Rebecca!” someone shouted.

But how to count these votes? We seemed to be stuck in some weird Marx Brothers sketch. (that’s old business!)
“Raise your hands! When I point to you, count off!”

The process was clumsy and was abandoned at about 15. One lady got fed up and decided to count the people herself. This, too, proved to be difficult.

“Make sure you count everyone!” someone shouted.

However, it we soon realized that the exact vote didn’t matter. People had voted 2 to 1 in favor of Carl.

The Carl crowd skewed older. Many seemed to think the earlier chaos was somehow Rebecca’s fault. I even heard someone say, “She’s too young, she’s not experienced enough.”

So Carl was precinct chair, but the bulk of the work was done- now they just had to count the votes. Hillary Clinton won easily, 68 to 39. In fact, the numbers were roughly the same as the Carl-Rebecca vote.

Rebecca looked shell shocked. Her face was bright red.

“I’m exhausted,” she said.

A kind, white-haired woman put her arms around Rebecca. Rebecca began to cry.

“I’m afraid everyone’s gonna think I’m crying cause I didn’t win.”

For the record, I don’t think that’s why she was crying. 60 complete strangers had just yelled at her. When you are trying to be a force for order in a chaotic situation like that, you get a huge adrenaline rush. Then, when it’s over, you crash, and your emotions act like a pachinko ball.

Maybe there was something else, to. Maybe she had gotten her first taste of elected government- and didn’t like it.

As I was leaving, I noticed a journalist. Her badge said she was with the foreign press.

“That was pretty crazy, huh?” I asked.

“Eh,” she replied. “It’s vasn’t zat bad.”

– Hillel Aron