Centerfield

Texas County Convention HELL, Part I

We'd been trained and everything. Both Obama and Clinton campaigns held training sessions, and we went to one at a big, rich house in the Hill Country for ours. Caucus votes, which we were casting, for the next stage, the State convention, are allocated by which delegates get the most votes within the caucus. Each caucus decides on its state delegates on its own. It also covered strategy tips like making the other candidate vote first so you can know how to allocate your votes to maximize votes won.

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The Obama campaign warned us to show up early, at 7:00, before the crush set in. I take a long time to wake up, 1:30, which would've meant waking at 5 to make it by the convention center by 7. We got lazy, and decided to aim for 8, still two hours before the convention started. That meant leaving at 7:30. Except, this time we hit a traffic jam a couple of miles out - half of Austin going to the convention. We crept along, the baby starting to cry, and then going to sleep (whew!). We got there at 9:15 instead of 8. It took us another 15 minutes to understand how the lines worked (there were some decoy lines of people who didn't get it).

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They gave my wife delegate credentials, but told me there was nothing for me, and that I should go to the convention skybox to do credentials challenges. We went to the skybox, and went inside to a bunch of yelling. I asked about credential challenges, and they pointed at one of the yellers, with a notepad in hand.

"Put your information down on the sheet, and wait here for your precinct number to be called," said a woman.

I went up to the man, and the same voice continued, "SD14?" No, I'm in Senate District 25, and said so.

"Oh, that's on the other side of the partition," she continued.

I went, and was relieved to see it was much calmer there. People pointed me to the man with the corresponding sheet. I suggested my wife go to the floor and find out what they knew there, and call me when she found out anything. I saw men with buttons with my precinct number with two women, and joined them. It turned out the two women were also in my precinct and my pickle, except Clintonistas. Eventually, our number was called. We walked over together to present our cases.

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During the whole convention, I kept being frustrated at the pointlessness of many waits and wanting to run for whatever job runs the convention just to bring it from the early twentieth century to today's way of doing things. I guess it's the same impulse that gets parents to adopt troubled kids.

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Tune in to the same bat-blog and the bat-time for the next episode. Will your intrepid blogger get to join his wife and kids today, or will he be stuck outside the whole day? Find out in the next episode,