Caucus volunteer!

Jeff here - reporting direct from the homestead in snowy Oskaloosa, Iowa. Jen and I flew in for a extended holiday visit on Jan. 2, just in time to personally view the majority of the season's political campaign television ads (Obama's win didn't feel like a surprise, considering that based on my viewing of a Des Moines channel, he must have outspent his competitors on advertising at least three to one in the last days before the caucuses.)

Jen's father is an elected county supervisor in Iowa, and as such, he had the opportunity to take my possible candidate of choice (Fred Thompson) on a tour of the county courthouse and through the town square a week or two ago. I was hoping to be able to attend a caucus with him, which worked out perfectly. On caucus night we went to a Republican caucus for a combined four rural townships (for which previous caucuses have had a turnout that didn't even break double digits.) We met in a small church in the snow, and there was a horseshoe of folding chairs and a chalkboard set up in the small vestibule. Jen's father had to check people in and do some paperwork, and my plan was to kinda lurk in the back and check things out.

Well, the people came, and came, and came - nearly 80 folks showed up, forcing the caucus to be quickly relocated to the church gymnasium (which is when I was able to become an official volunteer, setting up tables and chairs.) Caucus is about as grass-roots a process as you could imagine: first, a temporary chairperson calls the meeting to order, but from that moment on, the people decide what to do, who to name chair for the evening, and how to go about voting for the various candidates. It was interesting to observe - from where I sat, Iowa Republicans seemed voraciously pro-party-platform, and not interested in compromising that platform in order to do something silly like win a general election. Hence, Huckabee's sweep. Apparently, many Iowa Republicans would rather suffer through four years of another Clinton presidency than vote for someone who is not totally behind what they view as the moral aspects of the party platform.

Not that Huckabee doesn't have his own fairly liberal track record to account for (which he's done to many conservative's satisfaction.) But in my opinion, he's nearly as unelectable to a liberal Democrat as Hillary is to a Republican. This should be an interesting race as the primaries continue.

Anyway, the majority of the caucus meeting is not about naming a presidential candidate. Most of the meeting was taken up with the process of creating resolutions that will be sent by delegates to county meetings. Resolutions about anything at all. One woman wanted to resolve that all residents get themselves "off the grid" and refuse to use foreign energy sources (that resolution didn't pass - first of all, it was an odd request to make at a Republican caucus, and second of all, farms take a lot of energy to run. I suppose you could uproot all the corn and plant windmills instead, but that would seem to defeat the purpose.) A pastor got up to propose that the people resolve to ban all abortions except to save the life of the mother, but he was derailed when it was pointed out to him that this is already a clear position in the Iowa state Republican party platform. He settled for a proposal that all abortions be banned except to save the literal physical life of the mother, in fear that liberals might start to include the emotional health of the mother as a good reason to abort. Proposal passed!

Fascinating experience. A few folks found the national media hype amusing (the fact that Iowans would brave the horrible winter winds to caucus seemed to come up in almost every national caucus-day broadcast, while the fact that Iowans also seem to brave horrible winter weather to go grocery shopping never seems to make the news.) Our particular presidential caucus results: Huckabee by a landslide, followed by Ron Paul and Fred Thompson.

I'll try to post some photos when we get home. Cami is having fun meeting cousins, seeing farm animals and experiencing her first snow. It's a great vacation.