Minnesota Caucus

I attended the caucuses tonight here in MN. I think the last one I went to was in 2000. I also think that this was the only competitive caucus in at least twenty some years. In all the others there was either a clear frontrunner or an incumbent. At this point in 2012, the GOP has neither.
So let me tell you a bit about the night. There were somewhere around 150 people there, all split into various precincts. Ours had 13 people in it. We had a secret ballot where everyone wrote down their preference for Presidential candidate. For us it went 9 for Paul, 2 for Romney and 2 for Santorum.
The Paul supporters were the most vocal. Also the youngest, the not only the young were for Paul. One of the Romney supporters was an impressive sounding man who studied economics at the University of Chicago. He supported Paul economically (though notably not on the gold standard) but thought he would be disastrous on foreign policy.
We chose a delegate to go to the next round. I volunteered and was selected. The other two that volunteered were both interesting. One was a wild eyed libertarian. The kind with lots of passion but who turns off people who are on the fence.
The other was a lady who had brought her 15 month old son. I talked with her a bit and she said that he suffered from dwarfism. She and her husband (who was also there) are the parents of nine, five (I think she said) are adopted. It takes a very special type of person to be that giving and I have all kinds of respect for her.

One of the Paul supporters was a young lady who said she had voted for Obama in '08. She didn't think he could do that much damage in one term and she seemed regretful. I got the impression that she would vote for Romney in the general but that she would need some convincing.
There was a strong feeling throughout that some serious changes need to be made to the whole scale of gov't that we now have. There was also quite a bit of opinion that the US should stop being the world's policeman. I'm coming around to the idea that we can't stop but we can look for ways to minimize. I don't know how many people in the Republican leaning side of the country feel this way but I can tell you with utter certainty that it's more than there was a decade ago.

When I got home and told my wife that I'd accepted some additional duties she wasn't the least bit surprised.