The Texas Observer

So maybe step No. 2 in the Texas Democratic prima-caucus won’t be so combative after all.

The leaders of the Hillary Clinton campaign in Texas held a conference call with reporters this afternoon to discuss what they expect from this Saturday’s county/senate district conventions. They struck a remarkably positive and conciliatory tone.

It was just last week that the Clinton campaign asked party officials to postpone the county conventions — the second in the three-tiered caucus process that will award 67 delegates — due to alleged fraud and confusion. Party Chair Boyd Richie said no.

“If I were dictator for the day, we would postpone the conventions for a week,” said Garry Mauro, who’s heading Clinton’s team in Texas. “I am not dictator. The chairman of the party made the decision that the current process could deal with all the confusion. We are dealing with the confusion very well.”

So everything is hunky dory? Not so much. In recent days, Hillary’s campaign rattled off emails calling all lawyers across the nation to converge on Texas and volunteer their time to scrutinize the county conventions.

But, Mauro said the Clinton campaign will not contest the convention process in any broad way, and won’t challenge the seating of any delegates at the county conventions. Individual Clinton supporters may file isolated challenges with each convention’s credentials committee. But, Mauro said, “We won’t be raising any [challenges]. There is no systematic approach that we are taking to challenge anybody on any level.”

He also said the he was comfortable with the party’s actions and that it was unlikely the Clinton campaign would file a lawsuit against the process. The biggest headache will be handling the crowd. “It’s organized chaos. The biggest problem will be somebody will show up at a meeting place and the electricity isn’t turned on. Somebody will show up at another place and the doors won’t be unlocked. This is a huge undertaking on a massive scale using all volunteers. So I think the only problems you’re going to have is the scale of the number of people participating.”

The campaign estimates it has about 45,000 delegates (and 30,000 alternates) at the 250 conventions to be held Saturday. The Barack Obama campaign has at least that number, and perhaps more. Despite news accounts that Obama won the caucus, the process isn’t finished, Mauro pointed out. Who wins the most delegates out of the caucus half of the Texas two-step will largely depend on which campaign ushers the most supporters to the county conventions on Saturday.

Said Mauro, “By Saturday, we should have an 85-90 percent certainty of how the delegates split out.”

by Dave Mann

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Elections, Hillary, Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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