Participating in the Nevada Democratic Caucus last week gave me an interesting perspective on the Presidential race this year -- a look at things on the front lines, where actual votes are cast and recorded.
Prior to the caucus I got a phone call from a live Clinton supporter who urged me to vote for Hillary ("because she has the experience to get things done") and told me where my caucus site would be. I got a recorded message from Edwards, inviting me to a meeting of his supporters in Henderson. Nothing from the Obama campaign. That struck me as odd -- I thought perhaps his campaign had decided to cut back on the expense of outreach calls because of the boost he got from his endorsement by the Culinary Workers Union. If so, it was a big miscalculation.
My caucus site was the auditorium of an elementary school a few blocks from my house. When I got there, one side of the room was filled with Clinton supporters, mostly older white women wearing yellow Hillary T-shirts that the Clinton coordinator was handing out. Behind them sat five or six undecided voters. On the other side of the aisle were the Obama supporters, mostly blacks of all age-ranges. Behind them were a handful of Edwards supporters, and later in the proceedings a single Kucinich supported identified himself.
I sat with the Obama supporters. The Obama coordinator had no T-shirts, just some campaign stickers to put on your shirt front.
There were 55 voters in total present for the caucus.
At one point I overheard two of the Clinton supporters, older white males, whispering to each other about caucus strategy. One of them said, "We've got to make sure none of the undecideds go over to the dark side." They smiled conspiratorially at the phrase, which I didn't feel was a reference to Stars Wars.
There's a lot more of this sort of casual prejudice abroad in the land than people might like to believe and I think the Clintons have made a deliberate decision to exploit it -- to position Obama as "the black candidate" and make people feel o. k. about indulging their sense of blacks as "other".
It's pure, cynical Rove-ian politics, morally sickening in itself and even more sickening because it will probably work, at least as long as Hillary can make plausible denials about her involvement in the statements of her supporters, including her husband Bill. To me, such denials are not plausible, and I won't vote for Hillary in the general election if her tactics succeed, unless it's absolutely necessary to defeat an even more objectionable candidate, like Mitt Romney. In other words, John McCain has become my second choice for President this year.
If the Clinton tactics can so thoroughly alienate an old-time lefty like me, I hate to think how she would fare with more moderate Democrats and independents in a general election. I think we might see a Democratic defeat of McGovern-like proportions.
At my caucus, there weren't enough Edwards supporters or Kucinich supporters to make either of them eligible for delegates from our district. In the end, all the Edwards supporters and almost all the undecideds moved over to the Obama camp and the vote ended up very close to even, with Clinton edging out Obama by a few statistically insignificant votes, as it turned out. We awarded 5 delegates to each candidate. This mirrored the way things went throughout the state, with Hillary getting more votes overall but splitting the delegates just about evenly with Obama. (The press tended to report only the vote totals, which gave Clinton the "beauty contest" win, barely mentioning that in the race for delegates the Nevada contest was essentially a dead heat.)
When it came time to elect the delegates themselves, most of the volunteers on the Obama side were undecideds who'd crossed the aisle that day. I thought that was a good sign for my guy.