Sunday, March 16, 2008

"Dear Boyd"

Garry Mauro, the Clinton campaign's point man in Texas, says it's splitsville for him and Hill if the TDP doesn't quash those mean old caucuses:

In a letter sent to the state Democratic Party late Friday, the Clinton campaign asked that the March 29 county and state senatorial district conventions be postponed until the eligibility of the estimated 1 million caucus-goers that turned out March 4 are double-checked, the Associated Press reported Saturday.

Verifying that caucus participants were qualified by voting in the primary and that they were at their appropriate precinct caucus is the biggest challenge that remains for the party, Mauro said.

Without that, Mauro said, it will be impossible to know whether the regional convention delegates accurately reflect caucus turnout.

"We have to wait and see who shows up (at the regional conventions) and who's qualified to show up," Mauro said.


Boyd seems a little unsympathetic to the Clinton campaign's dilemma:


State Democratic Chairman Boyd Richie said the party has received about 2,000 caucus complaints, ranging from people butting in line to someone possibly stealing caucus sign-in sheets so that certifying a victor will be difficult. But he said with a record caucus turnout, he considered the problems to be a small part of a successful caucus process that energized Democrats.


Most of the whining coming out of the Clinton camp these days regarding the Texas caucuses has to do with the "unfairness" of it all: because Mrs. Clinton narrowly won the primary half (two-thirds, actually) and lost the caucus half (one-third, to be precise) by nearly a two-to-one margin, cries of "It's Bush 2000 all over again" and "one man, one vote" have become nearly a cacophony of squawking. The upshot is that precinct convention delegates and alternates can expect Clinton supporters within the ranks of senate district leadership -- particularly those who have hand-picked their pals to staff the temporary rules and credentials committees at the SD conventions -- to either go out of their way to deny Obama delegates, or slow down an already cumbersome sign-in process on the morning of March 29. They want some payback for the grassroots activists beating them on the evening of March 4, and intend to take it at the end of this month. They'll use the swollen turnout as excuse to try to shaft a whole bunch of green-behind-the-ears Obama delegates showing up for the first time. The Obama campaign has to prepare their delegations for this possible sabotage of the will of the caucuses, else they will be easily rolled by the seasoned Clinton operatives.

More drama ahead, and likely more whining from some quarter.

Sunday Funnies

I hope I never have to disavow something my pastor said.

Oh yeah; I don't go to church. Thank God.





Friday, March 14, 2008

Pelosi: No Obama-Clinton (that goes for me, too)

I don't agree with Nancy Pelosi very often but after the past week I believe she's spot on with this:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it's "impossible" that Democratic presidential contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will join together as running mates this year.

"I do think we'll have a dream team," Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol. "It just won't be those two names."

Pelosi earlier this week told Boston TV station NECN that the two wouldn't combine their efforts because Clinton has suggested the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, would be a better commander-in-chief than Obama.

I think Speaker Pelosi is absolutely correct.

Obama has never expressed any indication that he would want Clinton as his running mate, and the recent racist smears by the odious Geraldine Ferraro eliminated any remaining possibility of his adding her to his ticket.

And FWIW I can't see how Obama can accept the V-P slot if Clinton manages to steal the nomination, when it would just give McCain all the ad material he needs to attack the both of them -- Obama for being "inexperienced" and Clinton for being a hypocrite and a political opportunist of the first order.

Needless to say, this offer has now expired.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Bulletins from the front lines

Christian Science Monitor:

"These six weeks are one of the most critical periods for the Democrats," says Joseph Aistrup, a political scientist at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan. "The candidates will be floating a lot of trial balloons to see what particular angles work."

The audience is only partly the voters who will award Pennsylvania's 158 delegates.

Perhaps more important, analysts say, are the nearly 800 elected officials and party leaders known as superdelegates who may well tip the race; the ordinary Americans whose poll responses journalists use to gauge shifts in political momentum; and the Democratic leaders who will decide whether and how to proceed with do-overs of the primaries in Michigan and Florida, which had been stripped of their delegates because they moved up their contests in violation of party rules.

Clinton won Michigan and Florida. But Obama didn't appear on the Michigan ballot, and to honor the party sanctions, neither campaigned in the two states.

Those primaries, if replayed in some form, would throw 366 delegates back into play. But it would also raise the threshold to win the nomination from 2,025 to 2,208. According to an Associated Press tally, Obama now has 1,598 delegates and Clinton 1,487, including pledged and superdelegates. Neither candidate is likely to pile up enough pledged delegates – those awarded through voting – in the 10 remaining contests to seal the nomination.

A decision on whether to rerun the Michigan and Florida primaries could come in the next couple of weeks, a move likely to divert a raft of campaign resources to those delegate-rich states.

More at the link. From a report filed at the Harris county executive committee meeting (of Democratic precinct chairs) last evening:

About 600 voters voted twice mostly on EVPA (Early Voting - Personal Appearance) and on Election Day. ... about 1100 voted in both primaries, (perhaps) in a combination of EV and Election Day voting. Actually some may have voted in the R primary and showed up for the D precinct conventions but that will not be known until the SD credentials are done.

I posted already about encountering one of these double voters. Of course this is voter fraud, but not the kind the OAG of Texas usually chooses to prosecute. Some of these cases will eventually be turned over to the Harris County DA's office; a new man starts there soon.

Senate District conventions promise to be chaos, as the final allocation of Texas delegates is at stake:

Curious whether Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton won Texas' Democratic caucuses March 4? The official results won't be available until March 29. ...

The (Texas) Democratic Party gave up Monday on its effort to produce a running public tally of the (delegate) count. The state party had set up a reporting system, outside the official count, that relied on 8,247 precinct chairmen to voluntarily call their results to 254 county chairmen who would relay them to state party headquarters.

But an estimated 1 million Democrats — far more than ever before — showed up for the caucuses, which were held right after voting ended in the first part of the Democratic contest: a standard primary administered by state government.

The huge turnout played havoc with the caucuses, creating confusion, long waits and even a few calls to the police to calm frustrations late on March 4. It hasn't made the count any easier either. ...

Now the party will rely on the official system laid down in its rules. Those rules require only that precinct chairmen mail the results of their caucuses to their county party chairmen 72 hours after primary election day. County chairmen don't have to reveal those results until county or state senate district conventions on March 29.

As in many states with caucuses, these district conventions pick delegates to a state convention in June which picks the actual national convention delegates. The Associated Press uses the results from local caucuses to calculate the number of national delegates each candidate will win, if the candidate's level of support doesn't change during this multi-stage process. ...


This is why the Texas Two-Step is actually four steps: primary, caucus, senate district, and state convention. It allows for lots of manipulation by those who know the system (i.e. Clinton supporters) and those who don't (i.e. Obama supporters).

Houston's 857 precinct results are still coming in, said Harris County Democratic chairman Gerald Birnberg. The count has been slowed because precinct convention chairmen ran out of official sign-in sheets, so they tore "Democrats Vote Here" signs off the wall and scrawled the preferences of caucus-goers in long hand. Birnberg said a dozen workers have put in 12-hour days since March 4 just making sure the paperwork was right, without even counting the votes yet in the state's largest city.

My SD will have 1522 delegates to the convention; at the moment to convene in a high school gymnasium capable of holding between 11-1200. The chairman's response is to seat overflow delegates in a separate auditorium.

That scenario is fraught with legal peril. The 'plan B' response was "Not all the delegates show up anyway."

This development bodes further ill for participatory democracy in Texas. Thousands of disenfranchised voters, delegates, and alternates coming to the process for the first time are likely to be more than a little disillusioned by their exclusion, which doesn't have rosy portent for their continuing their participation in the future, now does it?

Some will stay and fight while others will leave, turned off by the sausage-making of democracy. The only question left to know is how many and who wins as a result.