January 17, 2004

In spring they'd be crocuses

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How does a caucus work, anyway? I have to say, if it were held in spring, it would sound kind of appealing to me. You get a crowd of proponents for each candidate in your living room (or, more likely, a public building in your precinct), sort by candidate, then count up the votes. If one of the candidates fails to get 15% of the votes in the room, he's (now that Carol Moseley Braun has dropped out, I can safely use the male pronoun, right?) disqualified, and his supporters have to find another candidate to support. This process can, as you can imagine, take some time and test your powers of persuasion. There's obviously a lot of room for discussion and horse-trading here. It may seem a little haphazard, but you have to remember that there are convention delegates chosen as a result of these meetings, so it's serious business. For a more detailed explanation, the Des Moines Register has prepared a page of FAQs for you.

In my last Iowa post I mentioned the CJR's Campaign Desk site as a media watchdog; the Annenberg Foundation has also set up one of these; it's called FactCheck. The proprietor of FactCheck was on "Now with Bill Moyers" last night; he said he'd heard some complaints about there being too many corrections to statements made by and about Democrats on the site. He rightly pointed out that all the action at the moment is on the Democratic side, so why would you expect otherwise? Fair enough.

Posted by Linkmeister at January 17, 2004 12:29 PM
Comments

I watched Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday and he mentioned how the caucus works...People sitting around a living room deciding and bartering about a candidate..not much better than chads and dimple counts...

Posted by: toxiclabrat at January 18, 2004 03:23 AM