Amid lingering nightmares from the trauma that was a presidential caucus four years ago, I put my big girl pants on and boldly walked in to lead the precinct breakout meeting at caucus this afternoon. Where we had over thirty people show up four years ago, and four people two years ago, I had no clue what to expect for today. I held my breath as I was the first to sit at our precinct table. Within a few minutes, a few others had showed, including Mr S-P who had to zip back home to get his phone that held his preregistration QR code to get through the door. We had a grand total of eight attendees in our room, counting myself. With the presidential choices already completed by mail-in ballot on Super Tuesday, all of the cranky pants people who were ready to throw down over Hillary vs Bernie stayed home. We had eight lovely people who were ready to open up about our knowledge of and feelings about the candidates. The big surprise was learning that we were all basically on the same page. We all wanted the former speaker of the state house to represent us, we had positive impressions of the neuroscientist political novice but weren’t ready to send her up for this advanced job, and as our mothers all taught us, said almost nothing at all about the former governor. (If you cant say something nice...)
I get stuck between wanting to control everything in these meetings because I enjoy my seat of responsibility and wanting to completely defer to every other person in the room because duh, representative democracy. I hope I found the right balance. We all kept falling over ourselves trying to be polite and encouraging, and I mean everyone did that. We had four people volunteer to hold three delegate slots, and we tried to out-nice each other to figure out who was going to be the one volunteer left out. I ended up getting to be one of the three again. I’m glad that this time the county assembly and convention will be here in town rather than down in Boulder. It means we don’t have to get on the road quite as early.
A year and a bit ago, I wanted to be one of the delegates who goes all the way up to the presidential nominating convention. Last year’s cancer treatment and this year’s blessed arrival to come has taken the wind out of those sails. I don’t have the drive to glad-hand and campaign to be chosen to go to Milwaukee. Besides, after my candidate of choice dropped out of the race, I’m less inspired to go into thousands of dollars in debt to watch one of two old white guys that I don’t particularly care about get the nomination. Shoot, for that matter, I don’t even think I want to step up to go to state convention. I’ll do my duty at county, and then step aside for people who aren’t awaiting their first grandchild right in the middle of the process. I have better things to do.
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