Caucus Night in Colorado
Tuesday, Feb. 9, 2012
So I went to my Republican caucus Tuesday night. The meeting was in the Orchard Mesa Middle School, but next door is the swimming pool, where a large number of kids were leaving as we caucusgoers were arriving. I heard one mom explain to her child, "No, not haucus. Caucus. With a 'C'!"
Inside my haucus meeting, we had a large turnout of 37 people, led by county treasurer Barbara Brewer and her husband, former county GOP chairman Garry Brewer. Assistant U.S. attorney Michelle Heldmyer served as secretary. (This will be significant in a moment.)
Three people stood up to speak in favor of Romney, Santorum, and Ron Paul. (Barbara Brewer was, in fact, the Romney chairman for Mesa County.)
Garry Brewer said, "I know you all have your different candidates you support for different reasons, and nobody is perfect. In fact, there was only one man who was perfect, and they crucified him!"
He added, "I remember we were cheering for Scott McInnis because he voted to impeach Clinton. And then it came out that our own guy who was pushing the impeachment was doing the same thing Clinton was." (If there was a Gingrich supporter in the room, he didn't speak up!)
Finally we marked our voting cards. I was going to vote for Romney, but I assumed that, like 2008, he would easily win Colorado, so at the very last second, I circled Rick Santorum, just to "make things interesting" I guess.
They counted the votes and Romney had 11. Santorum had 20! Later we were told that all three precincts in the school had voted for Santorum. Guess I wasn't the only one who wanted to "make things interesting."
After choosing delegates to the county convention, we were asked to name issues that we wanted the Republican party to support. It reminded me of a Rush Limbaugh convention:
U.S. out of U.N., and U.N. out of U.S.
Secure the border
Term limits
Get rid of EPA
Get rid of Dept. of Education (at which point someone said, "Yeah, and that third one that Rick Perry couldn't remember!")
Somebody else said, "Prosecute Eric Holder!" (the Attorney General)
Michelle Heldmyer, the U.S. attorney, said, "Hey, I'm not going to write his name down. He's my boss!"
Another person said, "Do away with the czars. They have too much power."
Garry jumped in: "Did you know that czar comes from caesar? Yup, and so does kaiser in German. They all mean the same thing!"
Somebody asked, "Which district is Laura Bradford in? I don't like what she's been doing." (a reference to her threat to switch to the Democrats after a drunk driving incident in Denver)
Barbara explained, "She's in District 54, but the Democrats changed District 54 to include just Grand Junction, and they took part of Orchard Mesa, the part that's served by Persigo Sewer Plant. So we call it the 'sewer district' now! It also includes the cemetery, so it's the sewer and cemetery district."
"Where's the boundary? I'm pretty close to the cemetery!"
To which I replied, "Really? You don't look that old!" :)
Then Garry Brewer told us a story about how there used to be a room in the courthouse just for the Civil War and WWI veterans. It contained old drums and guns and uniforms and papers. But in 1991, John Leane and another Democrat on the county commission closed the room and gave the materials to the museum. When Garry inquired, they said they received some lists and books, no drums or guns. "I never found out what happened to that stuff."
Somebody said, "Did you look in John Leane's storage unit?"
Eventually the meeting was adjourned, and I came home to find out the statewide results. CNN's John King was telling everyone, "It will come down to the vote in El Paso County, home to Focus on the Family. They will vote strongly for Rick Santorum." He also tweeted, "Colorado caucus counting is worse than in Iowa!"
Meanwhile, someone at Fox News said, "At least there's no 'guy in a truck' this time!" (a reference to an AP report that the Iowa results were waiting for a guy in a truck to arrive at the courthouse--but there never was a guy in a truck)
Finally around 1:00 am New York time, the final results came in, and Santorum jumped ahead of Romney to win the vote 40% to 35%. Since Romney had been widely expected to win Colorado, it became the big story of the day. So even though the vote was not binding, Colorado managed to grab its share of the national spotlight.
