
Last week I got to participate in democracy in the Greek style. Many centuries ago the ancient Greeks in Athens came up with this simple political philosophy, let the people participate in the government. In Texas we got to vote twice if you voted in the Democratic primary. TWICE, isn't that cheating. Obviously it is not. My good friend, Judge Clark who wrote the book "the Fall of the Duke of Duvall" about the ballot box stuffing scandal there would probably disagree but that's what we did. I voted once in the early voting and on the March 4election day I got to vote again, after the polls had closed.
So here I am standing outside this old historic one-room schoolhouse in Welfare, Texas waiting with some loyal Democrats to caucus for the candidate of our choice. When I moved to Kendall county 12 years ago there were probably only a handful of Democrats. Gee, Democrats don't even run for local office here. To my surprise 40 people showed up at my precinct caucus to vote a SECOND time(the ancient Athenians would have been happy). This was just at my precinct. I didn't know that there were even 40 Democrats in my entire county. I noticed several of my neighbors there. We had been in the closet for awhile, I guess and had just been outed. We signed in and waited for our written vote to be tallied- 24 Obama supporters and 16 Clinton supporters. This allowed us to pick delegates for the next convention on March 29. I was selected as a delegate, one of four for Obama. Not bad for an old Canadian boy who had been naturalized some 21 years ago. Another good immigrant story. Perhaps that's why I feel so akin to Mr. Obama.
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