http://blog.joebiden.com/?p=1677
Stacy - Des Moines Says:
January 4th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Our caucus had 545 people with many Independents and Republicans in attendance. Obama had 231 in the first round. Edwards and Clinton were tied at 103. Biden started with 46 and was not vialble. Our group went to work and immediatly Dodd’s 13 people came with us and part of the Richardson group. After round two we were up to 68, still short of the 83 we needed for viability. But we did not give up. We had the former Lieutent Governor coming over trying to convince us to go to Clinton, Edwards people trying to tell us about Edwards (like we didn’t know) and Obama people circling like a pack of wolves.
The way the caucuses work, the Obama campaign could have given us enough people to make Joe viable without losing a delegate. We ask them several times and they flatly refused. We argued that Joe deserved to go on and that it would take a delegate from Clinton or Edwards. They still refused and we didn’t budge. Finally we got the 5 minute warning and told the Obama mob that unless they made us viable we would go to Clinton. They basically said, screw you — so we ulltimately went over to the Clinton camp. This was a move none of us ever intended on making. Many of us had Obama as our second choice, but the group was so rude, aggresive and operated with an ugly bully mentality because of their numbers that many of us just couldn’t stomach giving them our vote. My husband, who has consistenly said that Obama was his second choice now says that he will never vote for Obama now. We have 11 months till the election so that may change.
One scary note: my husband heard a couple in the Obama group say to one another, “This is great, the Republicans can beat Obama.” This is disgraceful, Republican plants there to make sure we ended up with a weak nominee.