Word: caucus
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...Iowa caucus is designed to answer the crucial question America has been asking for nearly a year: If old people, farmers and evangelicals chose the President based on their second and third choices, who would lead the free world...
Wanting to see democracy in whatever the opposite of action is, I walked into the Westridge Elementary School in West Des Moines to caucus. To my left, in a library full of Laura Ingalls Wilder books, the Democrats assembled for their uniquely convoluted system, which involves gathering next to the sign of your favorite candidate, hoping you can collect more than 15 percent of the voters in the room, trying to convince the followers of the least popular candidates to join you - and, most of all, re-explaining the rules every few minutes. To my right, in the unadorned...
...night that was historic in ways large and small. The sheer size of the Democratic turnout - 236,000 people, nearly twice as many as 2004 - distorted the caucus process...
...second-tier candidates, who need 15% of the total at each caucus to win delegates, found themselves overwhelmed by armies - the very well run organizations of Obama, Clinton and Edwards. Forced to make second choices, the overwhelming majority chose Obama...
...this thing," Trippi said. "We only had 42,000 hard count [i.e., committed voters], so to go from 42,000 to 65,000 or 70,000 - the message had to have been so strong that people got up out of their homes and went to a caucus without the campaign getting them there. Now the campaign that everyone thought was going to happen to or knew that was going to happen to was the Obama campaign, but it turns out that there were two of those campaigns." To be sure, Trippi was spinning the best possible story for his candidate...