Texas in Play

*I, combined with currents events, am slowly turning Open Source Dem into a regular contributor...

==========================

Forget Boyd RICHIE’s attempt to collaborate with the GOP to move up the primary date and deliver Texas for Fred BARON -- err, John EDWARDS. It failed, and it was lame in the first place. Now he will try to deliver for Garry MAURO -- umm, Hillary CLINTON.

That is pathetic and no more a favor for CLINTON than it was for EDWARDS.

The best interests of our state and, interestingly, of John EDWARDS -- still the potential kingmaker -- are best served today and every day by plain old republican democracy, specifically by contested state and national conventions … exactly what is shaping up.

Here are Josh MARSHALL and PDiddie on that likelihood.

Already OBAMA is moving his crack South Carolina team to Texas. Both he and CLINTON will be in Houston on 28 February for the Greater Houston Partnership/Sierra Club debate on energy, environment, economy, and security issues (E3+S). Policy wise, John EDWARDS still dominates this race. So ...

“We are the Deciders!”

Not just our votes, but our voices -- and they are many and diverse -- can be heard, if and only if we stop attempts by the state party establishment to “lock down” the state convention and to perpetuate themselves at the risk of losing the general elections -- the one thing, other than wasting money, they are certainly proficient at.

The state and national party hierarchies -- a patronage/daisy chain -- are describing brokered conventions as “chaos theory”. That is just a cute phrase. They no more understand that math than “queuing theory”.

Literati, not technorati, run this party. And they are now in panic mode. We have been in convention planning mode and now need to move towards execution. That needs to be calm and deliberate. This is the populist moment, our moment.

We are prepared. We need to be urgent but not frantic. We are not in danger of losing careers, retirement sinecures, or millions on bad bets; that would be the state party overlords. As Ed Kilgore notes, neither the state nor the national party establishment actually know how to run an orderly convention, as distinct from a beauty pageant. In his own way, that is exactly what Peck Young told us. Ed confirms at the national level what will happen in Austin on June 4: the state party machine will try to turn the convention over to Garry MAURO, less to deliver for Hillary CLINTON than to maintain their own death grip on the party.

So what a caucus of progressive populists can and should do is clear: as we are the party-building caucus, we should take the lead in providing all Texas Democrats with an orderly, productive, and fair convention process.

We do not have to create chaos. The party establishment is doing that for us on their own.

Oh, and the national party of bi-partisan collaborators proves once again they cannot design or proof-read a ballot, this time in Los Angeles. Their “counter-vote suppression theory” of racism hides simple incompetence and legalistic self-deception. Watch this story. The legal particulars of yet another “butterfly ballot” are peculiar to California.

But the general pervasiveness of bi-partisan and non-partisan administrative failure is certainly true of Texas. Yup, the party does not know how to run orderly conventions or even elections. Manipulation and obfuscation come naturally. Republican democracy are mysteries. People are fed up, if not fired up.