Back, beat, but pumped up.

Today we held Legislative District caucuses in King County, the Democratic Party stronghold of Washington State (many locales hold their meetings in conjunction with county conventions, but we split the out here). It was the biggest turnout I've seen in over 20 years of watching these things. With almost 500 seated delegates, sundry alternates and guests, there must have been 700 people in the room, easily twice the size of the next largest LD meeting I've ever seen in this area.

Kerry, naturally, carried the day. The main order of business was electing delegates to the Congressional District caucuses and State Convention. When all was said and done, Kerry sent 21, Dean 12 and Kucinich 8. There were some Clark and Edwards supporters, but most of them had folded into the Kerry camp by the time delegate selection was underway. There seemed to be a little horsetrading between Dean and Kucinich to bring the Kucinich forces up to threshold in a couple areas they fell short in without help, but overall it was a net gain for Kerry.

The Dean folks present had been elected as Dean delegates and were sticking to their guns, but seemed to understand that this was a last stand based on sentiment more than reality. I noticed some of the more prominent members of the Dean camp sporting both Dean and Kerry buttons.

Some of the Kucinich people just seemed nuts, though. They still talk like their guy can somehow pull this off, consolidate their fabled 'progressive majority' and make it to the White House. I mean, some of them really believe it. Others are sticking to the story that they can amass enough delegates to "have a voice" at the national convention and reshape the Party in their image. I may do a whole Convention Politics 101 piece sometime (it's one of my consulting specialties, actually) but suffice to say that political reality dictates that the candidate with the most votes on the floor has the only effective voice in the room. Kerry will own the show in Boston. Kerry delegates will pass every platform plank, win every rules debate, control ever credentials question. National conventions are fun. You get to be an extra in a major television extravaganza, and you get invited to some great parties, but if you want to shape the debate, you'll have more impact walking your precinct than sitting in Boston.

I was really kind of taken back, too, by some of the visciously anti-Kerry rhetoric that typified much of the material on the Kucinich literature table. I can't imagine that Dennis Kucinich, a decent guy who will ultimately endorse John Kerry, really wants to be represented in the way some of these folks have chosen on his behalf. This is why it's past time for him to get out. He's attracting a very unattractive fringe, who are drowning out some of the really fine, prinicipled people who've been behind him over the long haul, and diminishing his own important voice on critical issues like single payer health care. Kucinich really presents no threat to Kerry at this point, but, largely due to the excesses of some of his more extreme supporters, he's fast becoming his own worst enemy.

I didn't, by the way, toss my hat in the ring for delegate to the next level. Been there, done that many, many times, and I happily stepped aside in favor of some newer blood, in this case one of my successors as Legislative District Chair who was also one of the first Party Leaders in Washington to endorse Kerry last summer when that wasn't the safe move up here at all. I did get a chance to make the Kerry pitch to the full caucus and chaired my Kerry sub-caucus, so it was a day well spent.

More on some other stuff later, but I really need a soak.