Part 1: The Convention

I got up early yesterday to make sure I got to the Reno Events Center in time for the registration period of the Democratic Washoe County convention. Once I picked up my "Alternate" badge, I sat in the bleachers for more than six hours while listening to speeches by Harry Reid and other local Nevada politicians. In the meantime, the credentials committee spent the day trying to figure out how to seat the alternates, which led to some intra-party bickering. Here's how it was supposed to work:

At the end of the caucus, delegates were elected based on the results from the people in each presidential preference group. In Washoe County, this broke down to about 50% for Obama, 40% for Clinton, and 10% for Edwards. When the delegates entered the convention, they cast their votes for their presidential preference (which they could change later in the day), presumably the same one they chose at the caucus, although that wasn't mandated. As you might expect, not everyone elected to be a delegate shows up at the convention, and hence alternates are seated instead, preferably from the same precinct and presidential preference group as the missing delegates.

Because thousands of people showed up at the convention, it took awhile to count the first round of preferences, but it was clear that delegates were missing from all three major groups (Obama, Clinton, and Edwards). However, because it would have taken so long to go through precinct by precinct to select alternates, the representatives of each campaign agreed to make a motion for changing the rules as follows: if Edwards did not have enough alternates to replace their no-shows, they would be replaced by Obama and Clinton alternates, split 50/50. As soon as this proposal was announced to the floor, there was a general outcry form the Obama side of the room.

An Obama delegate went to the microphone and stated that they wanted to amend the rule change, but the chairman announced that before an amendment could be made, the floor would have to vote on the original suspension of the rules. After 10 minutes or so of mass confusion, the vote took place and the suspension passed. Immediately afterward, the Obama delegate proposed the following change (I was sitting in the bleachers thinking the same thing): that the Edwards no-shows should be split proportionately between Obama and Clinton, that is 5 to 4, rather than 50/50.

There was a debate on the floor about this issue. Someone on the Clinton side, not understanding the change, I think, proclaimed that this was disenfranchising the missing Edwards delegates. The chairman made clear that if you didn't show up, you couldn't be disenfranchised. Then another Clinton delegate made a better argument: that we were delaying the already long convention by fighting over 9 state delegates, and was it really worth it? The Obama people shouted yes. Eventually, there was a vote, and the amendment passed. Recounting this, it sounds like a mundane argument over convention rules, and that's what it was, but resolving a complex debate about fair representation in a room filled with over a thousand delegates was both chaotic and amusing.

So now that the process was amended to supposedly speed things up, they started seating alternates. They began with the Edwards alternates, and then seated the Obama and Clinton alternates. I hung back, as I had no strong desire to be a delegate unless my vote was needed. Thirty minutes later, it was clear that the Clinton people didn't have enough alternates either, and so the remaining Obama alternates (including me) got to cast their preferences. In the end, with Edwards delegates realigning and the Clinton no-shows, Obama went from having 50% of Washoe's state delegates to 58%.

At that point, the convention moved on to the phase where state delegates are elected for the state convention. Only those who were elected state delegates are eligible to go to Denver for the national Democratic convention, and hundreds of people clearly wanted to go. Washoe County is guaranteed one male and two female national delegates, and potentially two more from the congressional district, and so I realized it was highly unlikely I would be elected from the over 500 state delegates Washoe is entitled to. So rather than stick around for the state delegate elections, I left early to attend the Brianna Denison protests.

Part II: The protests

A few weeks ago, members of the Westboro Baptist church (AKA the "God Hates Fags" group) showed up in Reno to protest the funeral of a fallen soldier. Tens of counter-protesters showed up, mostly from biker gangs, and apparently there was a minor scuffle. When the church announced they would picket the funeral service of Brianna Denison, the young college student who was recently murdered by a serial rapist here in Reno, the story of which has received national coverage, the ACLU of Nevada decided to observe the protest to make sure the local police were protecting the constitutional rights of both sides. I decided to tag along.

When we got there, a blizzard had already been raging for over an hour. We walked out in front of the Reno Convention Center, where the service was being held, and soon saw three or four women from Westboro Baptist church standing on the sidewalk on S. Virginia St., one of the busiest roads in Reno. They held signs saying, "God Sent the Killer," "Pray for More Dead Kids," and "America is Doomed." We only saw a few counter-protestors, so we decided to walk down a bit more to see if we could find anything else.

By the time we walked back, there were hundreds of counter-protestors, mostly biker gangs and UNR students, surrounding the three or four church members. I started taking some photos, and got threatened by a biker for doing so. It was at that point that I realized that some of the bikers had swastikas on their jackets -- it's not often you find White Supremacists teaming up with college students during a protest, but that's what was happening. Then the angels showed up:

I'm not sure what their message was, but their costumes were creative.

At this point, it seemed like the police were doing an admirable job protecting the church members, but we crossed the street to get a better look. I had a hard time taking photos in the nighttime blizzard, but here is what it looked like:

Almost everyone in that picture is a counter-protester, but you can see two signs held by the church members below the big American flag.

After ten minutes or so of this, with the crowd occasionally cheering whenever a big bus or stretch limo drove by and blocked the church members' signs, a police SUV drove up and the church members willingly went inside. The cops later told us that they asked to be safely escorted back to their cars. The counter-protest immediately ended, and the memorial service began soon afterwards, attended by nearly 3,000 people.

The police did an excellent job keeping the peace, protecting the extremely unpopular protesters and even arresting an angel at one point who evidently became too aggressive. I thought they could've done a better job zoning the protest/counter-protest areas, but I guess that's difficult when you have 3-4 protesters vs. hundreds of counter-protesters. Still, I remember a protest in Boston once where over fifteen cops were lined up like a soccer wall in front of 4-5 neo-Nazis, and I thought that worked pretty well. Regardless, the emotionally heightened moment fizzled, and Brianna Denison got a respectful memorial service.

I don't want this to turn into a political blog, but I've always posted freely about American culture -- and the most dominant aspect of our culture at the moment is the recent behavior of both of the Clintons. Those who have spoken with me in the past few months about the election have heard me say that I like Hillary Clinton, that we need more people like her fighting for us, that it's important that America have a woman as president sooner than later, but that for various reasons I prefer Obama for the presidency. I usually then dive into those reasons, but I don't want to get into that here. What I do want to get into is that during the past week or so, I've felt the most political sadness since I realized that the Swift Boat attacks against John Kerry were sticking.

My sadness started when I was told by several Democrats at the Nevada caucus that they would not or might not vote for Obama because he's a crypto-Muslim. I knew that those emails have been going around, but to see people bring it up publicly underscored how widespread and widely believed the rumors are. That was a general sadness, not directed at any particular person.

But since then, my sadness has been transferred to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose behavior in the past week or so can only be described as "Rovian." First there was the technique of attacking and distorting one of Obama's strengths: his consistent position on the Iraq war. Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School describes it here, and is unafraid to call it "swiftboating." Then there's been the recent injection of Bill Clinton as the campaign attack dog, which even Robert Reich, who served as Clinton's Secretary of Labor, finds saddening. Recently, the Clinton campaign has been airing radio attack ads in South Carolina, which the Washington Post points out are deliberately misleading.

Some think that the Clinton's behavior will cause a backlash, and that Obama will benefit from all of this, as he did with Lorna Brett Howard, a former president of Chicago's chapter of NOW that switched to Obama after witnessing the Clinton campaign's distortion of Obama's record on abortion. I might have thought that a few months ago, but after what I witnessed at the caucus, I'm feeling much more pessimistic.

I think Clinton will win the nomination, and I will likely vote for her mostly for her Supreme Court nominations -- unless there's a viable 3rd party candidate that I like better -- although I question her ability to win the general election. But how Clinton's campaign is trying to get there really saddens me, and I wanted to get a bunch of links off my chest.

Here are some pictures taken at Vaughn Middle School today, where I participated in the Nevada caucus. (All photos taken by flea.)

I got there a little early, helping the Obama campaign give out stickers as caucus-goers walked in. (This is where I had my unfortunate encounter with a Clinton supporter.) There were four precincts voting at the school, so there were quite a few people filing in.

At noon, you had to be signed in and inside your precinct's room. They explained the caucus rules, computed the viability threshold at 13, and then had us gather in the parts of the room that represented our first choice candidate. The Edwards group barely made viability, but they were in. It was immediately clear that Obama had more people than Clinton, but there was still the "realignment" round. Only two candidates with any voters did not make viability: Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson. Most of those people realigned with Obama, but a couple went to the Clinton camp.

They counted up the realignments, put the final count on a white board, and started assigning the delegates. Obama got 7, Clinton 4, and Edwards 3. Right after this, each group was responsible for electing the delegates who will attend the county convention and cast their votes. It was a bit of a chaotic process, but I was glad that we sent a diverse group.

Our room started to empty out, so we started wandering around the school to see how the other precincts were doing. The picture in the upper right above was from one of the other rooms, held in the school gym. It was the only room in the school that Clinton took. (Obama was up three overall.)

After the results in our local precincts were settled, we went back home where the networks were already calling it for Clinton. Overall, I enjoyed the process, but was depressed by some of the reasons people had for choosing their candidates. And although I liked the community aspect of caucusing, I still feel that primaries are a fairer system.

One last interesting thing of note: it looks like the results here in Nevada are breaking down the same lines as the Question 7 campaign in 2006 (which I worked on). Notably, Question 7 did very poorly among older voters and Hispanic voters, exactly where Clinton did her best. Additionally, it looks like Obama beat Clinton by 10 points in Washoe County (Reno), and lost badly in Clark County (Vegas). Similarly, Question 7 did poorly in Clark and had its best performance in Washoe. I'm not sure what this says, but it's an interesting observation.

All right, time to go get some food after a long day of politickin'.

Correction: It's been a year since the 2006 elections, so I got some facts wrong. First, Question 7 did the best in Storey County, not Washoe, although it did very well in Washoe. Second, Question 7 did very well among Hispanics and not so well among African-Americans, so I completely reversed that trend. I guess that makes the above a less interesting observation.

Quick update: just got back from caucusing here in Reno, Nevada. Obama took 50% of the delegates in my precinct compared to Clinton's 29%, but CNN is calling it for Clinton. I'll be back in a bit with pictures and more details, but I'll just say one thing: if you don't think those Muslim emails going around are hurting Obama, you're wrong. One elderly woman with a Clinton sticker shouted at me nastily: "I won't vote for a Muslim!" I spoke with another person who had the same belief, and I later saw her in the Clinton corner. Very depressing.