PC Biz 7/7/08

Until further notice, PC stands for precinct captain, not politically correct or personal computer.

So far this year, Ive been to a caucus, 2 and 1/2 conventions, a central committee meeting and 2 PC meetings. This leads to...
LOCAL SO-AND-SO'S FIRST RULE OF POLITICS
The likelihood of somebody putting you in charge of something, increases exponentially with the number of meetings attended.

The first PC meeting turned out to be by invitation and I wasn't invited. I just got wind of it, and wandered in off the street. It turned out to be a meeting on how to train PC's. They said I was welcome to stay, and would I like to train PC's? I told them I should probably be one first before I tried to tell anyone else how to do it. You know, when I went to the caucus back in January, I was just going to vote. That was it. When I got there, I was one of seven people from my precinct that showed up. Wouldn't you know it, there were seven open seats to be a delegate to the county convention, so we all voted ourselves in as delegates. There were 500 people at the convention and 600 open seats to the state convention, so we all voted ourselves in to that. While there, they asked for volunteers to something called the Central Committee. I didn't know what it was, so I volunteered to find out. 100 people showed up for that meeting. There's no limit to how many people can be on the Central Committee, so we all voted ourselves onto that. After turning down an opportunity to teach people something I know nothing about, I went to the PC training meeting. Of coarse, I was the only one there from my precinct. So, BINGO! I'm the captain.

LOCAL SO-AND-SO'S SECOND RULE OF POLITICS
The amount of your involvement is inversely proportional to the level of apathy in your neighborhood.

The first thing they had us do is stand up and introduce ourselves. It seemed like every single person in there was either retired military, or married to retired military, and then there was me; a non-descript, scraggly ne'er-do-well who came over from the Libertarians back in the eighties. Wonderful. Talk about standing out in a crowd. Then we were given a five page handbook and a list of people from Votervault. The main goal is to find out where everybody is and which party they're in, so that come September, the candidates will know which doors to knock on, and who we need to call for meet-and -greet barbecues and such. Also, it will help to get out the vote on election day.

The Voter vault list is pretty much worthless, I think. My precinct consists of two rather large apartment complexes. The list doesn't have any apartment numbers on it. It's as if 700 people all live in the same house. I'll try contacting the apt. managers and see if they can give me a list of who's living where and then cross-reference it. The first thing I'm supposed to do is call everybody, but when I looked up myself I saw they didn't have my correct phone number, so I don't have much hope for that idea. I can always just register new voters and build a new list from scratch. People move in and out of here pretty regularly. Even though I see a looming disaster on the horizon, the total turn out for my precinct in January was 1 and 1/2%. I think I can improve on that.