In answer to the question about yesterdays post – I am a Republican. It is in some senses a requirement here. 28.4% of the registered voters are Democrats, 70.4% are Republican and the remainder are split amidst the various other groups. Most rural agrarian communities like this county are strongly Republican with a smattering of Democrats. Most of the voters are like me and do not vote along party lines, but for the best candidate for the job. The office I am running for is currently held by a Democrat who is term limited. In many respects, running for county commissioner is like running for a non-partisan office. The process of getting on the ballot is different, but the party ideologies are not the focus, local issues are.
Tonight’s precinct caucus was interesting if for no other reason than the fact most offices have at least two or more candidates on the Republican side. The national and state senatorial and representative races seem to have pulled a full scale onslaught of ideologues of all bents. The real problem is that many of them have forgotten the true test of reality – facts. Makes for interesting political speeches, but really inane debates. Likewise, there is an active pursuit of the governorship with a bit less of a loss of sight of facts.
All told, the caucus for the precinct I live in took slightly more than an hour. It would have taken less than an hour, but some of the standard speeches had to be made by party loyalists not running for office. We started by electing the precinct officers for the coming year. Then there was a straw poll for the gubernatorial candidates and the senatorial candidates, and after that it was all in selecting who the representatives to county assembly would be. Our precinct was apportioned 14 seats and we had 16 attendees, it could have been a race. Fortunately, one pair of attendees planned to be out of town, so the remainder were named as delegates to the county assembly. We then spent a little time drafting those not in attendance to be our 14 alternates. We also had to choose our dedicated delegate to the state assembly. Only three people were interested, so we elected one and named the other two as candidates for the at-large representation from the county. That was it for the official business.
In the tradition of all good precinct meetings, a couple of jokes had to be told at the start of the meeting. Although a bit stale, this warhorse was the winner:
Remember back when Ronald Reagan was President? We also had Bob Hope and Johnny Cash with us.
Now we have Obama as President and no hope and no cash!!
Time to get back to reality. I’ll leave with this to appease all the Democrats that read this blog:
