cageyness

Post-election recovery, Texas, Day 1

nobody@vox.com(cageyness) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:17:50 -0800

I have pictures and news, ~~but not the time to actually post everything~~, so here's a brief rundown. UPDATE: Photos made it in after all!

Voting at my precinct didn't finish until almost 9--meaning the last person in line at 7 didn't vote until almost 2 hours later, and yes, the line wound up and down inside the building when I arrived.

That kept all would-be caucus-ers (?) outside the building until 9, and it took another 2 hours to finish the process after that, including reading resolutions, etc. As has been reported, organization at the caucus level was somewhat lacking, which wasn't helped by the fact that most people who showed up had never participated in a caucus before--including me, but I had done my research and so I just tried to go with the flow.

Excuse me, is this precinct 223?

Chief among misunderstandings is that at caucus time people are, in fact, allowed to show their candidate support and talk about their candidate and even attempt to sway others to their side. The caucus is not an anonymous process--it's not like your vote (although, if you still believe your vote is anonymous you are very, very trusting...I have some beachfront property in Arizona to sell you.) I'm sure there were some nefarious deeds going down in other places, but all I saw last night were people making honest mistakes and the best quick-fix decisions they could make on the fly. The worst part about the night was the wait--not for me, but rather for the folks who showed up with 1 or 2 or 3 kids in tow. How's that for dedication?!

The best part about the night was being stuck in a room with people from the community who had never spoken with eachother before. People kept finding connections and striking up conversations...at the end of the night, with 30 plus people still hanging around to vote on resolutions, I think there was a general sense of "So THIS is why civic participation used to hold society together! Interesting...perhaps we should do this again sometime."

crowd waits to caucus

As you've likely seen, Obama was better at getting his supporters out to the caucuses, but boy was it close. My precinct went 14 delegates to the county convention for Obama and 13 delegates to the county convention for Clinton. And, um, oh yeah...I'm one of those Clinton delegates! Basically, we had 14 Clinton supporters at the end of the night, one who didn't want to be a delegate, and so we unanimously nominated and voted the remaining 13 of us as delegates. The alternate delegates will be chosen from the list of people who caucused and said they would like to be delegates, but didn't stay for the nominating and voting process.

crowds on the other side of bldg

And whether you're a Democrat, a Republican, or whether your candidate did well in your eyes last night, I will tell you this...this primary has done great things for my generation of voters in Texas. Today at the office, THE talk of every stolen social minute was about the election, about voting, about being part of the caucus and how "next time, I'm going to try to get involved to help things run more smoothly." Next time?! Such talk is unheard of in my voting experience. I loved it!

i voted on the fridge scrapbook

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Don't believe the hype?

nobody@vox.com(cageyness) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:51:59 -0800

I can't help it. Despite last night's freeze and the one to come tomorrow night, today feels like and certainly looks like spring!

my hillary sign

I woke up this morning to put my Hillary sign on the corner part of my property--yes, now that I'm decided, I'm in all the way--then headed to the polls this morning to try to beat the line that I thought would surely wind around the building. I'd forgotten that since the last time I voted little ol' Kyle had built and opened a new city hall, and this time only 2 precincts would be voting there instead of three. So, it was hardly a mad rush but there was a small line, at least for the Democratic primary, that went through the atrium to the outside doors. I imagine that this evening will be a little nuttier--what with all those people who had intended to vote this morning, but running late for school and work, probably figured, eh, I'll just do it tonight. (I have been there many times before.)

I think, though, that the caucus process is probably going to be long, tedious madhouse. I could be wrong.

It was cool in the morning, warm and breezy midday, and the trees in the front yard have buds and blooms coming to life. My run today cut my time to an 8.5 minute mile, and I even fit some yoga in too. I'm busy, but pleased to be, and I'm hopefully excited, rather than anxious, that good news of my divorce will come soon.

It's spring, I tell you! I declare it and so I call it forth!

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I've made my decision...

nobody@vox.com(cageyness) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:32:33 -0800

and I'm voting for Hillary.

I went to her rally tonight in Austin--a much smaller crowd, a much smaller venue than Obama's mass rally downtown last week--but whether the numbers bode ill for her or not, my conscience and my logic says she's the better candidate.

So I'll be "Texas Two-Stepping" it for Hillary tomorrow.

I plan to have my camera handy for as much as possible and do a little small-town Kyle reporting. Come back to see what unprecedented voter turnout looks like.

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I'm not sure who am voting for...but I understand why the lines are drawn

nobody@vox.com(cageyness) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:33:08 -0800

Photos from Obama for President Rally, Austin TX, February 22, 2008

Just came back from Sen. Obama's rally in downtown Austin. I hadn't planned to go, but with my 15 year-old cousin-godson staying the night with me, I realized this would be a cool thing to take him to experience. So I checked for parental approval and off we went, rather on a whim, driving into town. We were only about 20 minutes late--which was pretty good time since we had to get through traffic from an accident on the highway, as well as walk about 10 blocks from where we parked to the capitol.

Anyhow, I'll have more on the evening later perhaps. I just thought I'd post some links to the rally tonight.(These are from the Austin-American Statesman; I only had my cell phone camera.)

I have a lot to think about in the meantime. I wish a win for Hillary could be a clear-cut, feminist victory and a victory for the country; I wish she wasn't Bill's wife (I liked him, really, but I just don't like that she's the wife of a former president), I wish she had had the chance to become President before him; I wish I didn't worry that she could polarize the right against the Democrats and risk losing the general election; I wish she didn't come with that baggage; and I wish she was speaking to me more than she is, connecting with the country more than she is doing. She would make a good president. I just don't know if, even after so many years, this is really her time. She just seems to have lost momentum...more on that later.

The crowd was probably the most striking part of the evening...young, old, families, couples, all ethnicities...they were there. His is a mobilizing effort I haven't seen before in my adult life; I've only seen it on TV, in film, in old footage of JFK. It's true; I'm not exagerrating--that's what the crowd felt like. That alone is certainly powerful.

I don't know, folks...I don't know what's going to happen, but I understand either way.

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Election time: A moral dilemma

nobody@vox.com(cageyness) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:50:27 -0800

So it's Super Tuesday and Texas' own primary is just under a month away. There's all manner of local political theorizing that perhaps, for once, Texas could "decide this whole thing." I'm hardly convinced.

This great big red state's hardly been a battleground. Sure there are traditional pockets of blue--Austin and El Paso, but with Bush's stamp on the state for the last four presidential elections (first as 'guberner', then as pres), Democrats hadn't even bothered to give more than a cursory "keep fighting the good fight" glance to its Texas supporters.

Yes, I know that the presidential election isn't everything, and that our lives are touched more often by local, county, and state politicians than the empty promises of the Executive Office. Still, it would be nice to experience an election season in one of those swing states that seem to get all the press and the pressing of the flesh by every possible candidate from day one. If Texas is going to decide this thing--either at the party level for nominations or in November for the big dance--we may have to do it mostly on our own.

I'm being asked often who I plan to vote for and my honest answer is still "I don't know." I have problems with Hillary. I have problems with Obama. And before you ask for confirmation, yes I lean to the left, but if Giuliani didn't have skeletons in his closet to make the devil himself blush and could have actually mounted a real run, I just might have voted for him. Instead, in the first election of my adult years where there were actually a number of viable Democrat candidates, I don't feel terribly good about anyone.

I want to be passionate about a candidate, dammit! I want to believe in someone, not just choose out of desperation. I'd vote for Hilary if she weren't the wife of a former President. I'd vote for Obama if he weren't so celebrity slick and so wet behind the ears. On the day of the primaries, it may come down to a coin toss for me. I only wish I were joking.

I think that if I could believe that either of the candidates hadn't twisted rules and told lies daily to get where they are, I'd be willing to take the risk. But I don't believe it. I know better. Politics is messy and it's easier to participate if moral ambiguity is one of the special skills you can list on your resume. If you play by the rules, if you never stoop to the level of loopholes and half-truths, if you aren't just someone with the potential to be good, but the conviction that integrity means more than winning...well, you rarely win. As soon as you say "I won't go there" a competitor gleefully says "I will" and you and your high ideals and morality are left in the dust.

So where does that leave us, the voting public, when it comes to choosing our supposed leaders? If we look askance at every candidate, trying only to choose the lesser of evils, how does government ever become anything but a necessary one?

Back home in El Paso, the grey area of "anything for the greater good" and "oh, that's just politics" is playing out very close to me. Political corruption has been increasingly in the local press there over several years. And I mean, serious, old school, vote-buying corruption. So now at a time when the city needs its faith in the political process rebuilt, and when the next generation coming of age could actually help in that effort, its politically ambitious are only following the old guard.

Here's the story. Dee Margo, husband to Adair Margo of the Adair Margo Gallery (local art gallery in El Paso) and arguable gal pal of First Lady Laura Bush, is running for State Representative against the incumbent Pat Haggerty. The shadiness in this story begins before we even get into any mud slinging. You see, as reported by the El Paso Times and Newspaper Tree of El Paso (see links below), Margo conveniently took up a second residence or "moved his residence", or however you'd like to label the maneuver, in order to become eligible to run in Haggerty's district. It's an old move, one that political parties often encourage and facilitate in order to position viable candidates in key races. I would argue, though, that a tradition of rule twisting doesn't make it right.

In another district, the local race for city councilman/woman/person has multiple candidates who twisted, or who are claiming to have twisted, the same rule to be eligible to run in that district. One of those latter candidates is my soon to be ex-husband. The El Paso Times has called him out repeatedly for this Margo-like maneuver.

Now before the jokes start to fly about hell having no fury, I should say that I believe strongly that my husband--or at least the man I knew as my husband--could truly do a great deal of good for the city, for the district that he grew up in, and could be a major force for energizing and engaging the youth of El Paso in city life and the political process in general. I know that he loves the city, always has; he cares about his old neighborhood and the many generations of families living there. I know that he has the potential to be a great local leader and to affect change for the better.

However, I also know that he doesn't meet all of the residency requirements to run right now. That fact, that attempt to sneak through the loophole and its implications for personal integrity, rather overshadow his potential and his promise. Instead of being a passionate, energetic, sincerely and selflessly concerned candidate who stands away from the expected shadiness of a Dee Margo, he seems just another candidate whose intentions are called into question, whose motives can only be doubted, a candidate no better or worse than any other.

And so I'm left wondering how that microcosmic example plays out at the presidential level. In the end, whether I vote for Obama or Clinton, whether a Republican or a Democrat gains the top office, will it really make any difference? If the prim-rose path is the same for every candidate, whether they've already walked it or are just a few steps in, then no matter who wins the election, we, the public, have already lost.

Like the generations before me, perhaps I should just put my hope in the next one.

******************************

http://www.newspapertree.com/politics/1803-the-inner-loop-11-11-07

http://www.newspapertree.com/politics/2019-moreno-marquez-haggerty-and-margo

http://www.newspapertree.com/politics/2043-haggerty-and-margo-debate

District 3 race gets new candidate, same residency concerns

Who cares where politicians live?

Race for City Council's 3rd District draws second candidate

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