Caucus Conundrum

Greg:

The great irony is that Bill Clinton was instrumental in designing the current Texas system back in 92 when he was running for office and was intending to use the Byzantine rules to his advantage.

What comes around goes around.

"The great irony is that Bill Clinton was instrumental in designing the current Texas system back in 92."

That's not a great irony ... that's a great fiction. Texas Democrats followed along with many southern states to create a Super Tuesday in 1984 and 1988 (from memory, I believe 1988 was our first year to participate in this?). In 1988, Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis essentially played the roles of Obama and Clinton in terms of the outcome - one won the popular vote, another won the delegate total after the convention process. That process has changed only around the margins and Clinton was well aware that Jackson was contemplating a run in 1992. So now - according to your version of events - Clinton was "instrumental" in creating a process which explicitly aided the cause of a potential competitor of his in order to benefit ... himself?

Sorry ... I'm not seeing the logic there.

It does appear that the Clinton campaign made no good faith effort to organize for the Texas precinct conventions. From what I observed of the behavior of Clinton supporters who said they attended the campaign's "training," they were indoctrinated with a program of identifying every obscure irregularity and inculcated with a belief that Cliinton supporters would be robbed of their delegate votes by the Obama operatives running the conventions. This is not training to inform and prepare. Instead, it is a program to destroy a long-time political institution because the Clinton campaign was either too lazy or too inept to prepare and organize her supporters to participate in good faith. The real irony here is that Clinton had more of the "experienced" precinct participants than Obama. Too bad they weren't programmed to contribute to the success of the conventions.

Greg:

For what it's worth, I refer you to MSNBC

http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/03/03/724529.aspx

...it's worth noting that, according to Texas Democratic Party attorneys NBC spoke with in the last few days, Bill Clinton's campaign helped write those rules for 1992, and Bill Clinton twice won the Texas primary using those rules.

Several problems here ...

The implication is that Clinton's campaign lawyers - and ONLY the Clinton campaign lawyers - helped jigger the rules, presumably to aid their cause. As a matter of practicality, ALL of the major campaigns have campaign lawyers involved in the process. It's curious that ABC's unnamed source wasn't quoted in full context as it really jumps out in any critical reading of that blog post.

Secondly, there was no significant alteration from the 1988 rules, which - like today - give predominant counts to those areas that have better General Election turnout in certain election contests. The rules in place in 1992 would have been just as beneficial to Jesse Jackson, had he run. It seems highly unlikely that Clinton's campaign would have written rules that would allow for that. It also strikes me as highly unlikely that the TDP would allow for one campaign to write rules to benefit itself since they must remain neutral.