There were some brief impressions of the Williamson County Convention posted today in the various Texas Convention threads, including some from yours truly. However it's hard to write very much from a cell phone, and I wanted to really try to put down some of the feel, good and bad, of our county convention.
Overall, it was good in places and bad in places, not very well run, but the results were what we wanted them to be. Long, long day but it ended quite well.
Things started out at 8am (for us, anyway). When we got there there were perhaps 400 people or so in line. Over the next hour and a half the line moved perhaps 50 feet, and grew by 1000 people or so, snaking all over the high school at which the convention was held.
The delays were apparently caused by two things: software issues, which caused all badges to print as Visitor, regardless if they were trying to print Delegate or Alternate badges, and lack of printers (don't know how many they had, but many fewer than needed for almost 1700 delegates, plus alternates, plus visitors).
About 9:30 the line got going. By 10 we'd made it into the practice gym, where credentialing was held. 15 minutes later my wife had her printed badge; mine never appeared. About that time they started handwriting badges, and I got one of those. Had they started handwriting them at 9 we'd have gotten things done so much faster. People around us in line started making sharpie jokes about 8:15. There was no advantage to printed badges, really (they had a nifty barcode that was never used for anything).
We made it into the main gym, where the convention proper was held, about 10:30. Our precinct was given a spot on the bleachers. Inadequate room for our delegation, really, but they crammed too many people into that gum overall, and by late afternoon we were all feeling it.
Over the next hour we had several speeches. The best was by Jim Mattox (former congressman, attorney general, and a whole bunch of other jobs). He stressed the need for party unity. He admonished "ideological purists" in the strongest terms that they would be very ill-advised to vote McCain as a protest if their candidate were not the nominee. The calls for unity were almost entirely well received.
I say almost entirely because one woman in a precinct seated next to ours heckled anyone who, in her opinion, was praising Obama or failing to adequately praise Clinton all day. She looked pretty sour anytime someone called for unity, shouted at Mattox for a fair bit, and generally annoyed most of us around her. At one point he was trying to make the point that both candidates would get the right-wing attack machine geared up against them; she seemingly took that as a direct attack against Clinton and really started yelling. The only good side of this was that she had a very soft voice and the yelling was only affective at annoying us, not bothering much of the rest of the room. I do think she embarrassed many of the Clinton delegates she was with.
That's really the entirety of the friction I saw all day. People really were reminded that we're all Democrats first and we really want the same things. I think a lot of people left feeling good about the process and the result.
That's the end of the good news for a while. Problems hit about 11:30, right after they announced that everyone was credentialed. First problem: they forgot to do the Pledge. So we did that. Then they forgot the National Anthem, so we all got back up and sang it. Then off lurching into business...
The temporary chair was the Williamson County Democratic Party Chair. In my opinion he should never be allowed to chair any large event. He was long-winded and redundant, had a very shaky grasp of Roberts Rules, an odd idea of when to call in the parliamentarian and when not too, tried a couple of slightly dirty tricks at times, and confused things.
The first instance of this happened right away. He started trying to get us a Permanent Chair. For those that don't know, Texas starts every caucus/convention with a Temporary Chair. At caucuses it's the Precinct Chair, if there is one, or whoever gets the packet. At county conventions it's the county party leader. Once everyone is credentialed then the delegates together vote a Permanent Chair (Permanent is a relative term; the office is dissolved at the end of the convention).
Problem is, while everyone was credentialed, they hadn't "balanced" the precincts. Balancing means promoting alternates to delegates in accordance with the original precinct vote when possible. For instance, in our case, we came in 15 Obama, 9 Clinton, with a bunch of alternates on both sides. If Obama delegates don't show, you promote Obama alternates to delegates. Ditto Clinton. If either side runs out of alternates and there are still unfilled slots, then alternates from the other candidate fill the vacancies.
The agenda calls for a report from the credentials committee establishing the delegate roll prior to a vote for Permanent Chair, for obvious reasons; if you haven't balanced, you're disenfranchising any alternates who will be promoted to delegates. The temporary chair had tried to reorder things to get around that; he was called on it and backed down. In retrospect it might have been better if we'd let him get away with it, but who knew?
Since we couldn't actually get anything done, we broke for lunch instead. By this point it was 12:20 or so; we broke until 1:30. Lunch was good, and we got to talk to a bunch of people, which further heightened the feelings of everyone being on the same side in the broader picture.
When we got back we expected them to have determined where we needed to balance and expected them to get that done. Instead we got a bunch of candidate speeches. After while, they did read off the long list of precincts needing balancing and off went the precinct chairs and alternates to balance. That was maybe 2:30ish.
An hour and a bit of speeches and highly uncomfortable seats later, everyone was back and we finally had the delegations right. At this point, about 4 or so, we started to tackle the problem of electing a Permanent Chair. This started bad and got worse.
It started bad because we got a few nominees from the floor, and then someone nominated the Temporary Chair. Immediately upon his nomination someone called for closing nominations. This greatly annoyed a whole lot of people, but he insisted on running through parliamentary procedure to handle the motion to close nominations instead of just ruling it to be a really bad idea. So, we had to have debate on it, decide whether or not we could just rescind it (no), etc. This caused several long delays while the parliamentarian consulted. At long last we voted down the motion to close nominations, and several more came in.
Then it got worse. Someone (maybe misguided, maybe not) motioned that we vote the Permanent Chair by "dividing the house", meaning a stand-up vote for each candidate, counting everyone. In a crowd of 1685 delegates, it takes quite a while to count a vote. The person who, in my opinion, would've made a very fine Chair wound up with 9 fewer votes than the Temporary Chair. The counts were made without notes or anything else.
This upset a bunch of people, so we had a motion to recount, which turned into a revote instead since you can't recount a standing vote. In order to get things moving the other candidate withdrew his name and after a bit more debate we shot down the motion to recount.
Overall it took probably a hour and a half to get a Permanent Chair. If it had been done halfway sensibly (take nominations until there's a real end to them, do a first-round voice vote to determine viable candidates, then if necessary do a runoff with counting) we should've been able to do it in 20-30 minutes or so.
We then had to elect a Permanent Secretary. We breezed through that in 15 minutes or so.
At this point it was nearly 6 PM. Everyone had been there for nearly 10 hours, and the vast majority were entirely tired of it, because there really are only two things that we do at the conventions that matter in terms of Presidential preference (whcih is what most people care about). There are also motions (which matter for the party platform), but most people don't care.
The first thing is assigning the Presidential Preference of the county. This is done by delegates at sign-in time; when you sign in you indicate Presidential Preference. Same for alternates who are promoted to delegates. Once you sign in as a delegate you're done with that part of your job. The ensuing 2-3 (for alternates who were promoted) or 6-7 (for delegates who signed in the first time as delegates) hours are entirely pointless to Presidential preference voting, but if you leave you can't participate in the second phase.
The second phase is electing the delegate(s) from your precinct who will go to the state convention. The rules for voting are that you nominate candidates from within your precinct, then everyone casts a vote for one of the nominees. A quick example: suppose we'd had our original breakdown (15 Obama, 9 Clinton). We get 1 delegate and 1 alternate. The strategy calls for 10 Obama people to vote for one candidate, then 9 Clinton supporters vote for a candidate, then the remaining Obama people vote for a third candidate (an unofficial alternate alternate, which comes into place if the original alternate gets selected as an at-large delegate; more about those later). Basically you order people by votes received; highest vote-getter is delegate (or first delegate for multi-delegate precincts), next highest is alternate (or second delegate), etc, until you fill all slots. Ties are resolved by random method.
Obviously this phase is critical. If too many supporters of one candidate or the other leave, the precinct "flips". So it's critical that people stay to get to this point, which is what kept us there through the hours of nothing useful happening. If your precinct flips, there's something of a fail-safe: the convention gets some at-large delegates which are not tied to or elected by any precinct; instead, they're picked by the nominations committee. The rules are that the at-large delegates must be picked, if possible, to maintain the overall county at the same Presidential Preference ratio as the delegate sign-in. However, if too many precincts go to one candidate there wouldn't be enough at-large delegates to fix that, and at that point, too bad for that candidate. So flipping precincts really does matter, at least in potential.
In our precinct we didn't flip; in fact, we went the other way. Remember, we started the day at 15 Obama, 9 Clinton. At balancing time we were at 11 Obama, 6 Clinton. As it turns out, there was one Clinton alternate and several Obama alternates, so we went to 17 Obama, 7 Clinton. By itself that changed it from us electing an Obama delegate/Clinton alternate/Obama alternate-alternate to Obama delegate/Obama alternate/Clinton alternate-alternate. But in fact 3 Clinton supporters left right away (found that out later), and 3 more left over the next few hours, so when we went to vote it was 17-1. The remaining Clinton supporter was very gracious and nominated the Obama-supporting precinct chair as a delegate and voted for her, so we had a fully Obama delegate slate come out of our precinct. All of this makes no difference if our delegate makes it to state (she was the original pick anyway), but if she was unable to attend it prevents a later flip.
After the vote my wife and I left. We'd been there 10 hours, were very tired, but felt good about the whole thing, because the people were all really good and we had very good feelings towards fellow Democrats in our county. And that's really the best thing to come out of the day (besides getting to vote for Obama for the third time ;-) ).
Overall the delegate preference came out Clinton 34.12%, Obama 65.88%. We had 1685 delegates. I doubt they've ever had a convention with more than 100 or so before, and that may be very generous. They simply had no clue how to organize for that size event, and it showed.
Got there before 8 everyone was signed in by 11:30. 1685 Delegates almost that many alternates, it was a lot of people, very noisy. An experience to remember, worthy of a diary tomorrow. The BOR spreadsheet shows that Williamson ended up 84 Obama/44 Clinton going to state, or 65.625% Obama. I'd say the nominations committee did their job pretty well. And I'm proud of my county for going just about 2/3 for Obama.
One closing note, for those who've made it this far. Williamson is the next county north of Travis; Travis is Greater Austin. Williamson is formerly a county of sleepy small towns; in the 1980's it started turning into a bedroom community for Austin, but it did that first by appealing to more small-towny Austinites who wanted that feeling back. It's not been until the late 90's that Williamson started really coming more into its own. Now Round Rock, the biggest city in Williamson, and where I live, has a minor-league baseball franchise, major hotels, a big outlet mall, a brand-new hospital complex, a bunch of university extension campuses, and a whole lot more. Round Rock is also the headquarters and major R&D center for Dell Computer.
As the county has changed, the demographics have changed. This was brought into sharp relief later in the convention. 10 years ago or so, Williamson was 231 out of Texas' 254 counties in Democratic participation. This was a red, red, red county. As of today there are no county-wide offices held by Democrats; our representative in the house (gerrymandered over a bunch of counties, but he's still "ours", more or less) is quite right-wing-Republican, etc.
As of this year, Williamson is 9th best in Texas in Democratic participation. We've got a really solid slate of Democratic candidates all the way down the ticket, and have a pretty good chance of winning some of those races (especially, IMHO, with Obama at the head of the ticket; he'll do great things for turnout here).
Early on in the convention, the county constable came out to tell people (nicely) that they couldn't park in the fire lanes and had to move their cars (he actually pretty much suggested they just jump the curbs and park in the grass). He's a folksy kinda guy, actually pretty competent but very laid-back and small-town. He's a Republican, runs as a Republican, and works with all the other Republicans.
So, what I said about sharp relief: during one of the afternoon lulls, he asked the temporary chair to address the convention. He gave a pretty good (if folksy and rambling -- good more in content than delivery) speech in which he stressed an "all politics is local, your county officials do more for your day to day life than does the President" theme (though he mentioned that his son is in the Air Force and our soon-to-be-ex-President has obviously greatly affected his life).
Along the way through his ramble, he pretty much endorsed every Democratic candidate we've got, from Congress down to lower-level county officials. At one point he noted that he'd be in a lot of hot water with the Republicans but that he didn't really care -- which is a pretty strong statement, since these are all people he has to work with, as things stand. As he left the stage the temporary chair (in his Williamson County Democratic Party Chair role) was starting to armtwist him to jump parties; maybe he will.
All in all, a long, tiring, uncomfortable day, but more than made up for by meeting more Democrats than we used to think lived in this county, seeing how much progress we've made, making some good steps towards unity, and sending a strong Obama delegation off to Austin in June.