The Vote

One of the main things I learned in the last 24 hours is that you cannot sleep and blog at the same time. Wow, we are all getting really tired – it’s been a long week and the emotional pinnacle is yet to come.

Some of you may have read my twitter last night when I tired to put this into 140 characters. Well, forget it – here’s what happened.

I’ll post later about the speeches, but the most exciting moments were right after gavel down. To set a bit of background, at 1:15 local, Hillary had a highly private meeting at which she released her delegates. She told them that she intended to vote for Barack Obama, and they were free to do whatever they needed to do. Apparently she then said something very strong, along the lines of, “make no mistake – no matter what those of you in this room decide, we WILL be nominating Barack Obama for president at the end of the day.”

So, there was still some drama. I had seen New Jersey Governor and Hillary backer John Corzine speak on CNN and he said that the New Jersey Hillary delegates had a morning meeting and voted unanimously to all support Obama. So the New Jersey delegation was going to give every vote to Obama. The outcome has been clear all along, but the question still hanging in the air was, would there be enough Hillary votes to put a blemish on the nomination of Obama?

So – the roll call vote was about to begin. There were some slightly lackluster nomination speeches. When my phone rang. It was Gregg, our delegation page, and he told me they needed me to come vote! I couldn’t believe it! This was of course my official role as an alternate, but I had never imagined that I would actually get to cast my vote for Barack Obama. Gregg said, “you need to be walking RIGHT NOW.” So, of course, I RAN. I flew down the stairs and met Will Fawkes at the top of the portal where the Georgia delegation was sitting. He gave me a floor credential and I ran down the steps to the Georgia section. Gregg and Jane Kidd, our State Party Chair, were waiting for me. They told me I was voting for Tommy Irvin, our state’s Commissioner of Agriculture! For some reason, he was delayed and could not get there to vote. He had originally been a Clinton delegate, but had told Gregg and Jane that he intended to wait and vote on the floor in case Hillary released the delegates, in which case he would vote for Obama. So there I was, to make history. Somewhat disappointingly, our delegation whip, Senator Gloria Butler, had already checked the Obama box, but I wrote out my signature, thereby making it official. One more for Senator Barack Obama!!! The floor was chaos as every state got all their votes and tallies organized. I lingered for just a few moments to soak in the history and snap a few photos, and then went back to my seat to watch and listen as we learned how the other 5000 delegates voted.

I got back in plenty of time to see Nancy Pelosi introduce the DNC Secretary, Alice Germond, who took over the podium to run the vote. Ms. Pelosi stayed on stage, along with a gal who tallied the votes on a laptop as each state was called.

The process worked like this: the secretary called each state in alphabetical order, announced how many votes they had, and asked how they would cast them. Each state then responded with a clever statement that included some state history or state point of pride, joke, etc. Alabama was the first state to vote. Though they were first, they pretty much set the trend. In most states there was a very small handful of Hillary votes with the vast majority going to Obama. After the first few went that way, I started to breath a big sigh of relief. Clearly, a few people were determined to cast their votes for Hillary, but by a huge margin, her delegates seemed to be following her lead. Arkansas was very interesting. In their introduction speech, they mentioned that they had been the state which gave Hillary Clinton her largest margin of victory in any primary. And then they proceeded to cast all of their votes unanimously for Barack Obama. Huge cheers from the crowd!

When we got to California, they got up and simply said, “we will pass.” I was not sure what that meant, but my friend Page who was on Boston four years ago explained that many big states would pass because everyone wants to be the one to put the nominee over the top with enough votes to claim the nomination.

So then we got to Georgia. I should have mentioned that each state’s spokesperson was usually a political star from the state – Jane Kidd, our party chair, and Shirley Franklin, our mayor, gave our presentation. They were very cute but I honestly can’t remember what they said. But Georgia cast 82 votes for Obama (one of them mine!!) and 18 for Clinton. I found myself wondering which 18 Hillary delegates had held out.

When we got to Illinois, they also passed.

Kentucky was, I think, the closest state. Obama still got a majority, but it was close to even. No cheers for Kentucky. But they did have a cute line about turning the Bluegrass Blue.

New Hampshire and New Jersey were both notable since they both voted unanimously for Obama. New Hampshire being the state where she made her comeback, and New Jersey being the state next door to her home state.

OK, where am I going with this, you may be wondering….

Well, I wasn’t keeping a tally, but someone was. We got to New Mexico. They gave their introduction, which was great, and then said, “but today, we are pleased to yield to the land of Lincoln. We yield to the great state of Illinois!”

Murmur – murmur – murmur in the crowd. We all realized that he must be on the very verge of locking it down. New Mexico only had 38 total votes, so it had to be really close. And they were going to let his home state put him over! How cool! How poetic!

So the Secretary recognized Illinois again. The cameras and attention shifted back to Illinois, and they stood up and said, yes, we are the proud land of Lincoln and the proud home of Senator Obama….but WE yield to the great state of New York!

More murmuring!!! Illinois was going to let New York put him over the top! And who was New York’s spokesperson? Yes, all the dominos starting falling into place and what was going to happen dawned on all of us nearly simultaneously to the camera shots of Senator Clinton making her way to the microphone stand in the New York delegation. And when she spoke, it was to make a motion to suspend the roll call vote and move to accept by acclamation the nomination of Senator Barack Obama as the Democratic Party presidential nominee. It was so incredible. Ms. Germond yielded the stage back to Nancy Pelosi, who looked like she was about to levitate off the stage with joy and excitement. She asked for a second to the motion and then we voted, in one loud strong voice, we said AYE! The gavel went down, and the cheers went up. The band struck up a song, and all the delegates were dancing in the aisles. Page turned to me and said, “and that’s how we make history.”

(Cross-posted at bluetrueblog.com)