Redstate

This week's story comes from Texas.

By Moe Lane Posted in 2008 | Pass the Popcorn | Rooting For Injuries | The Best Democratic Primary EVER — Comments (10) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

[UPDATE: Ann Althouse reports that a member of the Obama campaign has emailed to report this as being just a "data entry error". As you can guess by her title, she's not buying it.]

Yup, the Lone Star State: where, for reasons only known to God and Texan Democrats, they had to have a primary and a caucus, thus ensuring Chaos and Old Night.

Anyway, Ann Althouse passes along an amusing mailer that went to one of the delegates chosen that crazy night (via Glenn Reynolds):

I just got a flier in the mail from Barack Obama. It's clearly a special flier for delegates. It has my full name, address, and "Support Barack Obama at your County Convention!" There's no point in sending a message like that to anyone who isn't a delegate; the county convention is where the delegates meet, post-caucus. So, they got my name and address from a list of caucus delegates, and the lists of those delegates say who each person has pledged their support for. In fact, Clinton's campaign sent me a link to the lists that are sent to the campaigns, so I know what they look like. [ADDED: This list, which shows which candidate the delegate supports, is on line.] Technically, I could change my vote from Clinton to Obama, but the delegates were selected proportionately to represent the voters. Surely, he isn't suggesting that I do this, since he so firmly believes that delegates, pledged or super, can't go against the will of the people. Or is he?

There's a photo at the link.

Read on.

There's nothing actually wrong with this, of course: the county convention delegates are not obligated to represent the popular will, and if they decide to switch from one candidate to the other then there's not really anything that anybody can do - except sue the living daylights out of the Texan Democratic Party (you can apparently always sue somebody), but far be it from me to suggest anything of the sort. But what it does suggest are two things. First, the Obama campaign is actually campaigning a bit harder, and is a bit less confident, than might be suggested by its public persona*. This will probably surprise at least a few people that really should have known better.

The second thing this suggests is that the Democratic primary process will need to be completely overhauled, if not scrapped, after this election. Forty years of blithe assumptions that there'll always be a clear winner after the first handful of races have piled up to the point where the Democrats are facing an utter collapse of the whole process. These particular 67 delegates are in fact being counted in the running totals, but we won't actually know until June 7th who they're going to be allocated to. And if twenty or thirty flip...

Moe Lane

PS: Notice how the fight is getting nastier as the remaining delegate total gets smaller? Yeah, that's going to keep happening.

*I'm morally certain that the Clinton campaign is doing similar activities in Texas, but they're playing the plucky underdogs, so it's unlikely to surprise anybody.