A week ago, I was in a van going nearly 100 miles an hour down an icy highway.

Six students (myself included) and Prof. David Domke were rushing through the crisp air of Eastern Washington in a desperate attempt to get to Coeur d’ Alene. We had to get there by 7 p.m., when the Democratic caucus was slated to begin at North Idaho College. We had been stuck in Snoqualmie Pass for almost two hours, and had a lot of ground to cover.

But we made it.

The Obama-mania in Idaho was surreal. The packed gym echoed to chants of “O-bam-a!” I felt bad for the outnumbered supporters of Hillary Clinton. We live-blogged from the caucus that night, running around getting comments from voters and volunteers, uploading our posts and generally soaking up the general insanity of a countywide caucus. We were a part of Super Tuesday.

That was just the trial run.

On the way back, we made phone calls. We wrote posts. We made some more calls and wrote some more posts. You get the picture. We hit the ground running, and all throughout the rest of the week leading up to the Washington state caucuses, we barely had time to catch our collective breath.

While my peers covered the high-tempo, last-minute visits by the Clinton and Obama campaigns on Thursday evening and Friday morning, I went to see John McCain as he made a quick pit stop to rally supporters Friday night. It was a fairly mellow affair, and while it was interesting to see a political figure of that stature up close, I confess I wasn’t terribly impressed.

I’m fascinated by politics, but I was trying to keep a level head. I like Obama, but I don’t love him. The same goes for Mike Huckabee. They’re real people with real flaws, just like me.

To be honest, I was completely exhausted. I work for The Daily as a section editor, and transcendent political moment or not, I still had a lot of things to do. I also had a midterm that Friday morning, and had to pull an all-nighter to review for it. 

So by the time I got to Saturday, I was running low on energy. But that was fine with me. This was a critical moment of not just the presidential race, but of modern American political history, and I had the chance to be in the thick of it.

When I met my teammate at the Sammamish Plateau GOP caucus site, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The Republican precinct committee officer and site coordinator, Dave Irons, had warned me that things might be a little anti-climatic with Mitt Romney’s withdrawal from the race that previous Thursday. Still, the veteran of several caucuses had said that “Democracy can be messy,” and that the caucuses were the messiest form of democracy.

At first, I wasn’t over-awed by what I saw. The school cafeteria was lined with empty chairs at 12:20 p.m., and only a handful of people were milling about the room. The Costco cookies and apple juice were left untouched. The sound of kids playing basketball in the nearly gym spilled into the largely empty space.

Then people started filing in. Mostly older people, but then some younger folks too, sat down in the gray plastic chairs. It looked like a PTA meeting. Then more people came. The cookies disappeared. Pretty soon, the whole room was full, 300 in all. They had to bust out extra seats. A few people had to stand.

At about 1:15 p.m., Irons ambled onto the raised area at the end of the cafeteria. Speaking excitedly (for he is an excitable man), Irons outlined the rules and how things were to be run. People were to fill out bubble sheets using a sort of multiple-choice party platform quiz, and then select their preferred candidate. They were supposed to try and reach as close a consensus as possible, and then vote on delegates.

Looking at the crowd, I wondered how this was going to happen without chaos. But Irons joked that “Republicans are organized and get things done,” and he wasn’t kidding. There was to be no craziness after all.
People broke up into groups and caucused. There were some debates, but they were civil. Some groups stayed longer than others, but by about 2:30, the whole affair was over.

Just about the only confusing incident was when a group of around 20-30 individuals used our laptop (with its wireless Internet card) to find their precincts. That had happened after one of the volunteers had asked me if a couple of people could find their precinct numbers.

How do you refuse a request like that?

I said “sure,” and before you know it, we had a line of our own. And while it was inconvenient, I didn’t mind. It was more important for people to vote than for me to put up two extra posts on the blog. I’m a journalist, but I’m also still a citizen. It only seemed fair.

We were out of there by 3 p.m., and went over to a local library to upload some photos and video. We were both surprised by how orderly things were. Some of our classmates reported from more chaotic sites in downtown Seattle, but out in the suburbs, it was uneventful.

At the same time, however, it was anything but.
What I saw Saturday was democracy in action, warts and all. It was my first caucus. But it was also the first caucus of the vast majority of the people there.

John Tuohy, a Vietnam-era veteran and one of the first-timers I talked to, summed it up well.

“I have zero expectations,” he said. “It’s a civics lesson, that’s what it is.”

I agree. It was a civics lesson. And while no one screamed or burst into tears, Saturday’s caucus out in Sammamish showed me that even the more humdrum mechanisms of our democratic republic are fascinating, and worth covering.

It’s a lesson I hope to take with me long after all the nuttiness of 2008 has faded into memory.