detractors<\/a> who think that the Democratic party caucus process is “undemocratic”. I have to say, you need to experience it to understand what it truly means.<\/p>\nSince I live in a small town, I got to caucus in our school commons area with about 150 other people. And these weren’t just any random people off the street — these were my friends and neighbors. People I see at the grocery store, people I see at church. My son’s teachers and principals, the crazy lady at the post office. They were all there, together, and I got to just talk politics with everyone for an hour. I heard passionate viewpoints about candidates from people I had seen around town and never bothered to talk to. I attempted to coax our church’s sound technician into betraying Hillary to join our Obama camp. He did the same. There was an insanely high number of voting-age high schoolers attending. An Edwards supporter that knew my dad came over and introduced himself and talked about unions (my dad is a Republican scab that works for the county roads department). It was amazing to hear everyone’s opinion and get to understand so many differing viewpoints.<\/p>\n
Our caucus only lasted a little over an hour, and we ended up being able to send two delegates for Obama. All in all, I feel it was an hour well spent, and I would do it again. If only for the opportunity to crawl out of my shell with my fellow citizens and talk about politics for a little while. The process reminded me of what Democrats represent: standing together with your friends and neighbors and socially debating issues of importance. Who wants to walk into a room and do nothing more than check a box on a piece of paper? Where’s the interaction? The discussion? The debate? The social relevance? I consider the ideal Democratic viewpoint to be essentially socialism without the crushing economic woes. And I wasn’t disappointed in the least by my experience last night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t usually talk about politics around Nerdflood, but now seems like a good time to start. Last night, I participated in my first ever caucus, and I have to say, I am fairly pleased with how the process works. There are some detractors who think that the Democratic party caucus process is “undemocratic”. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[306],"tags":[535,394,536,717],"class_list":["post-405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-randomness","tag-caucus","tag-democracy","tag-obama","tag-politics","last-post"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}