GRIEGO: Caucus turnout was big, and that's a big, big thing

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published February 7, 2008 at 12:30 a.m.

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Onward now to the county conventions.

First, however, let us dwell a moment in the afterglow of grass-roots democracy. One hundred and eighty-five thousand Coloradans - give or take a few - showed up at their caucuses, parked blocks away, lined up in hallways, crowded cafeterias, spilled out into hallways and classrooms and gyms that grew stuffy with all that talking and voting and cheering.

Hear now from Corey Baker, the young African- American man I wrote about not long ago after attending a caucus training called Delegate University. After that class, he went to three more trainings. His newfound knowledge must have shown like a beacon because his neighbors said, why don't you run the caucus?

So, he did.

"It was scary because Mayor Wellington Webb and Wilma were in my precinct," he says. The former Denver mayor was very nice, Baker reports. The Webbs are also die-hard Clinton supporters and therefore were in the minority. Obama: 80. Clinton: 19.

And did you become a delegate to the county convention as you had hoped?

"Yes," Baker says, marveling. "I did. I am. I'm a delegate."

Baker's classmate at Delegate University, Estrella Alvarado, showed up at her caucus at Centennial K-8 in north Denver at 6:30 p.m. and had trouble finding parking. She came laden with fliers introducing herself to her precinct as the mother of a Purple Heart soldier who had recently returned from Iraq, a teacher, a Colorado native, a volunteer. She wrote that she was committed to a candidate who would work for all people and would work for world peace.

"I was the only one promoting myself, but I was determined to be chosen as a delegate to the county convention," Alvarado said.

She's going.

I checked in, too, with two other women who attended the training. "It was amazing," Republican Jill Eden says. "It was standing room only."

How many people were at your caucus last year, I ask her.

Just one, she says. "Me."

She's going to her county convention as a Romney delegate.

Dottie Deikman, a first- time caucus-goer, was named an alternate Clinton delegate.

"It was very satisfying to see people who didn't know what the hell they were doing struggle through the caucus process, kind of leaning on each other to follow the rules and make sense of it all," she says. "That's grass roots. And the spirit of community was one that you felt it might be more lasting than just a caucus. There's a fire going on inside of people."

I call Carolyn Boller, the Colorado Democratic Party secretary. She'd decided the senior center she booked for multiple caucuses would be too small and so had moved everything to the South Middle School auditorium.

"It held 450 people. We had 800," she says. "We ended up moving some into the library; some into two of the band rooms; into the cafeteria, and, of course, it was nuts. Overall, most people were patient. We had a couple of grumpies.

"One guy showed up at 4:30 and was irritated because he had come to vote and he didn't understand why he couldn't vote at 4:30 because, you'll love this, he had a date. One guy came up on stage and said, 'I'm going to sue you. This is the most disorganized thing I've ever seen.' What do you do when you have room for 450 and 800 show up?

"I swear when I asked, maybe 50 people said they'd been to a caucus before. I got a call from the former county chair on the way home and she said they had 2,100 people. If we had had 2,100 people show up in my House district, I would have been at the bar drinking."

A lot of people were confused, Mary Smith, the Denver GOP chair, tells me. She says, only half-joking, that 700 people must have called her wanting to know where their House district was or why there wasn't a voting booth because, despite the vast amount of publicity, they still thought they were going to a primary

"My favorite," Smith says, "was the call from a woman saying, 'It's 6:45 a.m. and it's an outrage the doors aren't open.' "

The counties are counting and calculating their delegate counts. The way I figure, and I figure with Smith and Boller's help, each county will send those delegates to their respective county conventions in March. From there, it's on to the state and congressional conventions and then the national conventions.

All those delegates chosen at the precincts, the hundreds, maybe thousands of them, now jockeying at the gates, will find the field narrowing over the next few months. Only 43 will become delegates to the Republican National Convention, and 56 will go to the Democratic Convention.

Jill Eden, the Republican civics teacher and Romney delegate, says she knows many people went to their caucuses because they were excited about their candidates. That's great, she says, but she'd like to say this: "Don't let it stop here. Be passionate about being an American citizen. Be passionate about the process. Make a difference."

The nitty-gritty is about to begin.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com

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