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Seeing as this is the day after Super Tuesday, this post won't be especially news-y. However, at least in my neck of the woods (Wichita, Kansas), for the past couple of weeks I have kept bumping into friends both in person and on the 'Net who wonder about the efficacy of the caucus system. This post is in part a response to them and their concerns, with the caucus I attended in Wichita serving as context.

One of my colleagues says simply that caucusing is the very definition of "undemocratic" in that one's selections aren't private but very very public--when you hear a caucus-goer say s/he will "stand for" a candidate, that's exactly what s/he will be doing (the two Richardson and one Edwards caucus-attendees last night were quite visible. After the Iowa caucus, some of you may recall, Hillary Clinton argued that caucuses disenfranchised voters who would like to participate but because of caucuses' narrow windows simply cannot attend at that timeFellow Wichitan (and political science prof) Russell Arben Fox has a more developed take here-- http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2008/02/why... --his central points are that the caucus format is the product of an older, more sparsely populated time, and that in urban areas it is simply unwieldy as a method of voting. Judging from my and Russell's respective experiences on Super Tuesday, Russell's point is well-taken: in my comment on the post I linked to above, I told him that, yes, there was more than a little of the pastoral about caucusing but that at my caucus site it was more like going to the stockyards. So also is Clinton's observation a fair one (though more than a few people read that as prompted by less-than-genuine concern, seeing as she said that after she lost in Iowa).

But here is something else I said in response to Russell, and I want this to serve as the starting place for some further comments:

[R]egarding the caucus system[,] I actually liked seeing people, as opposed to numbers on a tally sheet. True, we overwhelmed the volunteers running things--I got the feeling they were expecting a few hundred people but around 1600 showed up, over 600 of them brand-new registered Democrats--but seeing that auditorium full of people was a simple but powerful literalizing of the body politic. It was chaotic, but in a good way.

Russell's recounting of the crowds and confusion at his caucus site are similar enough to what I experienced that I'll let them serve as my recounting as well. But something I did want to note was what someone sitting behind me said as we looked across the auditorium at the Clinton caucus-goers (she had 210 to Obama's 1370): "I kind of feel sorry for them." As I thought about that statement, I realized why she said that. If those Clinton supporters--or, still more poignantly, the one Edwards supporter and two Richardson supporters--had appeared on a tally sheet in the newspaper or online the next morning, I would have gloated a bit over Obama's smashing win at my site and wondered what the matter was with people who insisted on standing for candidates who has withdrawn from the race. The caucus format humanizes voting such that, while I was certainly happy with Obama's win, I neither gloated nor questioned the mental fitness of the Edwards and Richardson supporters. Instead, I admired them for feeling so strongly about their candidates. Seeing as most public political debate occurs these days online, anything that turns pixels into people has some value.

There's also virtue in the caucus format's requirement that one be present at a certain time and stay there. As we can infer from the welter of stories of troubles voting machines, whether our votes will be counted accurately is not a sure thing. In the caucus format, though, assuming the volunteers have counted accurately, it isn't a vote that's counted; it's the physical presence of the voter that gets counted.

As I acknowledge above, the caucus system is not without problems, especially when used in larger cities or when, as in the cause of my caucus, the staff just badly underestimates what the attendance will be (I got the sense, based on what was announced, that they anticipated around 600 people; instead, they registered 600 new voters). Having said that, though, I would just close by expressing the hope that perhaps state committees would tinker with the system as as to better, more efficiently serve the crowds but retain as much of "standing for" as possible. It is a tangible reminder that the phrase "the body politic" isn't an abstraction.