| This is very strange:
According to a report in today's Washington Post (thanks to our Kossack friends for the tip), Senator Clinton's campaign is worried about the Texas primary system, and apparently some are only now learning how it works. From the Washington Post article titled, "System Worries Clinton Backers": Several top Clinton strategists and fundraisers became alarmed after learning of the state's unusual provisions during a closed-door strategy meeting this month, according to one person who attended.
What Clinton aides discovered is that in certain targeted districts, such as Democratic state Sen. Juan Hinojosa's heavily Hispanic Senate district in the Rio Grande Valley, Clinton could win an overwhelming majority of votes but gain only a small edge in delegates. At the same time, a win in the more urban districts where Sen. Barack Obama expects to receive significant support -- could yield three or four times as many delegates. They're only learning about this this month??? They must not be regular readers of BOR.
The night of Super Tuesday, I spent several hours reading up about the TX primary system. The next day, I looked at the incredibly useful Lone Star Project report about the numbers, and asked a lot of questions about how it worked. On Thursday, I wrote these two long posts explaining the Texas primary and delegate system, and on Friday February 8 (ten days ago) these two posts were published on BOR: That was two weeks ago. Last week, both KT and I wrote about how Senator Obama will do well in TX:I'm a 23-year old grad student who is not even living in Texas right now. KT is younger than I am, and just moved back to Texas a few months ago. How is it that Senator Clinton's campaign was not prepared for Texas?
The truth is, Senator Clinton's campaign never planned on having to run after Super Tuesday. They chose a handful of key states to focus on, and thought that would put them over the top. Meanwhile, Senator Obama worked in every state, picked up lots of little states to blunt Senator Clinton's California momentum, and has been racking up wins ever since.
Many state elected officials are complaining that the Texas primary process isn't fair -- that the formulas unfairly hurt the Hispanic districts (a process that they voted to ratify at the 2006 state convention). Well, the truth is, the formula rewards the Democrats that have been showing up to the polls consistently over the past couple of years in the general election to support our presidential and statewide candidates. As TDP Chair Boyd Richie explained in the Post article: The higher the turnout in each district in those years, the more delegates the district will get to select this year, explained Boyd Richie, the state party chairman.
"It's not that anyone's trying to penalize anyone," Richie said. "That's the last thing I want to do. What I want to do is encourage people to come back and vote. We want to have everybody participate." The party rules are established to promote those who come out to vote regularly for Democrats in the general election. This year, on March 4, in the Democratic primary, the areas of the state that vote Democratic when it's most needed (the general election) will have a larger delegate strength.
The truth is, many South Texas Hispanics only vote in primaries (as Sen. Mario Gallegos mentioned in the article) and don't vote in the general elections. South Texas Hispanics didn't vote for John Kerry in large numbers in 2004, and they didn't vote for Chris Bell in large numbers in 2006. The urban areas of Austin, Dallas, and Houston did. Instead, many South Texas Hispanics have voted for Republicans in the general election (for President Bush or Governor Perry) believing that the Republican Party provided an answer. Ironically, their leanings towards the Republican party may prevent them from having as big a voice in the TX Presidential primary as their fellow Democrats in Austin, Dallas, and Houston.
Oops.
Senator Clinton's strategy -- based on the Washington Post article -- seemed to be: Latino = Texas = Clinton. Senator Obama, meanwhile, has been focused on a positive campaign for change across the state. As State Rep. Rafael Anchia (D-Dallas) wrote in an op-ed last week: Our main focus should not be on who can appeal to which racial or ethnic group more than another, but which candidate can unite all races, ethnicities, age groups, faiths and economic classes as a nation to address our common challenges and to restore our historic position as a respected leader of the free world.
I am the Latino son of immigrants, but, rather than engaging in the contrived politics of division, I want Barack Obama, a black man of mixed ethnicity, to be my president. How's that for the politics of hope? When we endorsed Senator Obama, we did so because his politics aims to include everyone. He isn't dismissing caucus states, as Senator Clinton has. He doesn't look at a state and say, "I will win there because of the ethnic make-up of that state." Senator Obama believes every voice from every region and every background of this country should be heard.
That's why we endorsed him. And that's why he will do very, very well in Texas. |
