I went with my wife to her caucus because we had some slick expensive schtick mail from Hatch and Romney, and I wanted to see how many votes this kind of expensive campaigning brings in.
The whole show was incredibly depressing. We have thirty supposedly local precincts meeting six miles away from our slum where I see a lot of people going on foot to the bus/trax stops and walking to the Church, and maybe don't even have cars, and many work shift work to boot.
When we got there, there was no parking. The streets eventually were lined for almost a mile with illegally-parked cars. My wife was raving mad when she got there, because she had for some years held the caucus in her home. Last time she didn't even go because of her job, and she was hating herself for letting that happen by the time we got seated.
As we started out I was blathering to her about how useless being a Republican really is because of how the Party hacks stack the deck for their "inside" people.
Once the meeting got started, three old-timers we knew, who were sure Paul people showed up too late to find anyone at the desk in the gym where everyone from fifteen caucus groups had to show their voter credential to get a "credentialed" slip of paper in order to vote. So they just came to our classroom, where the two people running the show refused to let them vote without their "credentials". It turned out as the meeting progressed these two had been called personally by Orrin Hatch and stood up to extol his irreplaceable clout back in Washington, and had brought about fifteen Hatch supporters with them. My wife mourned that they had used to be "good" conservatives.
The three people who got booted out would have made the difference in the delegate selection, even with the two Hatch supporters huddled in the corner to count the votes privately, perhaps.
But I got their names, and as the convention comes around I intend to go a' callin' to try to reason with them. Odds are, we are riding a wave where a lot of Republicans will get elected to the Senate this year, and if we put the old deadbeat back in this time, Utah will just end up with some junior republican who won't chair any senate committee for years.
