voting

On Saturday I fulfilled my duties as a Seward County Delegate to the Nebraska State Republican Convention. So if anything goes wrong in the world in the next 4 years you can pretty much blame me. I road to the convention with Mark Kolterman. He’s the new chairman of the Seward County Republican Party, and he told me that the day after the county convention he received phone calls from the Omaha World Harold and the Nebraska Republican Party chairman asking if it was true that Ron Paul supporters had taken over the Seward County convention. He assured them that that had not happened, but that two of the four Seward county delegates were Ron Paul supporters. Mark’s thoughts on the Ron Paul supporters were echoed multiple times at the state convention: We will need everyone we can get to elect John McCain in November. In a move that I think surprised all of the Ron Paul supporters in attendance, one of the first orders of business was to seat those delegates who had been elected in “irregular” county conventions. These delegates were almost entirely Ron Paul supporters and it was an impressive display of inclusiveness.

All in all there were 54 Ron Paul supporters out of about 340 total delegates. We were only loosely organized; about two weeks prior to the convention we formed a Nebraska chapter of the Republican Liberty Caucus. We had buttons to identify each other and a handful of candidates that we wanted to send to the National Convention. It was fun. “Back room” deals were made with other blocks of voters to send delegates to the national convention. We are sending one of the nine congressional district delegates (this was unexpected as it was quite unlikely) and a few at large delegates and alternates. In fact, all of our delegates were elected. We should have had more ready to send, but we were all new at this.

We were not at all ready to offer resolutions or changes to the state party platform, and the amendments that were offered were soundly defeated (although on one a division of the house was called for. That was exciting). One of the amendments what was offered by the delegation from one of Nebraska’s Western counties we an eleven point amendment. Some of them were poorly worded and no one was in the mood to debate them all separately, so, although I heard several (non-liberty caucus) people say they agreed with most of the amendment, it went down in flames.

There were tons of speeches from all of our (many) Nebraska Republicans in office and one very vicious speech by the Chairman of the National Republican Party. The speeches were very similar and were along the lines of, “We’ve been acting like democrats, we have to get back to our roots, we’ll all have to work hard to elect John McCain, because his Republican ideas are the only way to protect our great country.” But it took several hours the way they said it. Interestingly, Nebraska (republican) senator Chuck Hagel was a Persona non grata at the convention. He was not mentioned once and was often referenced in mysterious terms: “She was working in his office and it was suggested that she lay low for awhile, so she’s not at the convention.”

There were lots of other things that I found interesting, but this post is already too long.