Obama Super Tuesday Happy Hour at the Showbox
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Oh, Those 43rd District DemsCheck it:
Notes from the Caucus, Round Two
by Eli Sanders
I sat through about four hours of the April 5 legislative district caucus in Seattle's 43rd District—the invocation by a local Buddhist, the laughs at the die-hard Kucinich supporters, the yawns, the shouts, the period of American Idol–style campaigning for those coveted spots as a state convention delegate. It was all very long, but very interesting, quite well attended, and, of course, a little nutty.
This particular legislative district caucus meeting was held at the former Lincoln High School in Wallingford. When I showed up, the gymnasium was overflowing with precinct delegates who had been elected at their precinct caucuses on February 9—and with what seemed to be an even larger number of wannabe alternate delegates. So much for the idea that all those young, energized, newly involved Democrats wouldn't show up for the next step in this process.
After registration was done, the energized Democrats listened to speeches delivered from a half-darkened stage in a nearby auditorium. (How many Democrats does it take to turn on a spotlight? Apparently more than the 1,000-plus in the auditorium, because the spotlight never came on.)
There was a portion of the program devoted to surrogate speeches, and Obama's surrogate, state senator Ed Murray (D-43), stood at the rear of the stage (where the lights were actually on) and pronounced: "I have been coming to these meetings since the mid-1980s and I have never seen anything like today." The numbers were a very good sign, he said.
Hillary Clinton's surrogate? He was very, very late, causing a lot of grumbling from the crowd, which was overwhelmingly pro-Obama. When he finally did show up he was... Sean Astin??? Yes, the man who played Samwise Gamgee in Lord of the Rings had flown up to rally the Clinton troops. Which made very little sense, given that the type of people who show up for legislative district caucuses on a Saturday don't really need a celebrity (or semicelebrity) to motivate them to take political action.
Astin's speech was most memorable for this line: "Should Obama get the nomination, I will become a massive Barack Hussein Obama supporter."
Hussein? Eyebrows shot up. Brows furrowed. Heads turned. A friend in the audience texted me: "Hussein!?" I'm not sure what Astin was up to with that line, but someone probably should have told him that Seattle's 43rd District is the last place in the U.S. where subliminal messaging around Obama's middle name is likely to move Democrats toward Clinton.
Further proof of this: There was some time to kill as multiple tallies of the delegates and alternates were done, and when the time killer of taking audience questions had run its course and the idea of telling jokes had been nixed, someone suggested doing the Pledge of Allegiance to pass the time.
At the mere mention of doing the pledge, there were groans and boos. Then, when the district chair put the idea of doing the Pledge of Allegiance up to a vote, it was overwhelmingly voted down.
There were to be 67 delegates to the state convention apportioned at this legislative district caucus, and the end result was no surprise: 14 for Clinton and 53 for Obama.
(Source: The Stranger: April 10 - 16, 2008)
The Stranger
