First Principles

My blogging’s been pretty sparse of late, on account of my involvement with the Washoe County caucuses yesterday.  I’m happy it’s done, and even happier that Washoe County’s caucuses were smooth and successful, even if the turnout was disappointing.  But the overwhelming consensus from caucus goers county-wide was that the planning and organization of this year’s caucus was orders of magnitude better than it was in 2008, and every Republican in the county has an army of phenomenal volunteers to thank for that.

When our precinct meetings were done, the counting began.  Somehow, with only 4 – 6 people counting ballots at any one time (we would have had more, but the campaign observers were worried they wouldn’t be able to see and track the count), we finished our final count and reported it to the state party in just a few hours. The observers from all four campaigns left happy with the transparency, fairness, and accuracy of the count.  In fact, the mood in the room amongst the different partisans of one candidate or another was relaxed and fun – I dare say that in that room at least, the party unifying was already beginning.

So given my experience, I’m still trying to fully comprehend the depth of incompetence that has the Clark County GOP still counting ballots as of this writing, 34 hours or so after the last regular caucus vote was cast.  It is maddening that the entire state is now being slagged in the national media because of the buffoonery of a single county.  It’s unfortunate that the CCRP did such a poor job educating their folks about the other purposes of a precinct meeting (which includes selecting all of the members of that county’s Central Committee) – otherwise I suspect that every member of their county party’s leadership would have been summarily ousted yesterday.

I wonder who could have predicted that a small group of paranoid loons who don’t understand the purpose of a political party would so completely screw up the most basic of party duties?

I’ll have much more on all of this in a couple of days.  In the meantime, I’ll be on Nevada Newsmakers tomorrow at 12:30 on Channel 4 to discuss the caucus.