Lessons In Bias and Local Politics From the St. Charles County Caucus

I did my best to piece together an accurate factual summary of Saturday’s canceled caucus in my county, but now I’ve had time to think about what it all means. Here are a couple of interesting reactions I had.

I was surprised how much bias played a role in each person’s interpretations of the event. Hundreds of us were in the same gymnasium witnessing the same events, but many of us walked away with remarkably different conclusions.

I am completely convinced the objective truth is that the local officials repeatedly violated the caucus rules set forth by the Missouri GOP and that this led to the outrage which led to the canceled caucus. But I saw multiple Santorum supporters online who didn’t understand why other caucusgoers couldn’t follow the clearly posted rules about recording devices, and many were convinced that Paul supporters more or less ruined the caucus with their disruptiveness.

Of course, we didn’t all witness the exact same events. People sitting in different areas of the gymnasium saw different details. People heard different rumors and information from different people. People read different things on the Internet. If you were a Paul supporter, you were more likely to come into contact with Paul supporters complaining about violated caucus rules. If you were a Santorum supporter, you were more likely to come into contact with Santorum supporters complaining about following the camera rule or about Paul and Romney supporters colluding (though breaking no caucus rules) to unfairly shut them out of the process.

From my point of view, I think, how can Santorum supporters be so upset about people not willing to follow the suspicious no-camera rule but not be at all upset about Dokes clearly and repeatedly violating the caucus rules? But of course I also find myself willing to downplay the yelling and disruption coming mostly from the Paul and Romney crowds, which probably also violated the Rules of Order, because I believe that raucousness was a result of the broken caucus rules.

I also thought it was interesting to watch such dysfunctional local politics. This was the second local political gathering I had gone to in the last twelve months, and the second that devolved to large amounts of shouting and discontent, threatening to descend to mob rule, and ultimately ending in nothing getting accomplished.

The first was a local subdivision meeting to update subdivision rules that were like fifty years old. Apparently there were big financial problems with people not paying their annual fees and an inability to properly raise the fee, but attempts to give more power to the trustees led to sharp opposition and signs and flyers about the trustees wanting power to foreclose on your home or double the fees without warning.

A lawyer trying to explain the proposed new rules didn’t help much, and the crowd of fifty to a hundred mostly older white people became more and more upset. Discussion of old and new grievances about inconsistently enforced property rules led to further delays, and eventually people didn’t even trust the volunteers ready to count the votes. The meeting ended with the new rules shot down, and all the old problems or weaknesses still in place.

I figured the truth was probably somewhere between the trustees not having enough power to do their jobs properly and the new rules giving them too much power. I also saw how sharply people reacted to potential threats on their pocketbook. I figured transparency about the budget and the trustees’ activities might help things, but that’s also hard if half the residents don’t have emails and it costs $1,000 to mail stuff to everyone’s houses.

So now I’m 2 for 2 when it comes to local political meetings that were completely dysfunctional. This affects my general belief that the federal government has too much power and things would be better if they were decided more locally because the people making the rules are closer to the people being affected by the rules and there’s greater accountability and there’s more incentive to govern properly because it’s easier to move to another county than to move to another country and all that.

I still believe all of those things, but I’m learning that local politics aren’t a magic cure-all, either.