While the Clinton campaign steps up its efforts to ratify the sham elections in Michigan and Florida -- their lone lifeline in a campaign they have otherwise thoroughly lost on the merits -- they seek to disenfranchise actual voters in a real contest -- that in Texas.
On Wednesday:
Garry Mauro, Clinton's state campaign chairman, said Wednesday he is satisfied that the process is working well. Mauro said Clinton is planning no challenge to the process.
Birnberg said he is not expecting many challenges to convention delegates because too many delegates would have to be rejected to change the mix for either Obama or Clinton.
"If you're talking about Senate District 13, which has 4,000 delegates, you cannot imagine how many credential disputes you'd have to have to change" the outcome, he said. "That probably takes 1,000 successful challenges mathematically."
Then on Thursday:
Hillary Rodham Clinton's Texas campaign is challenging the seating of delegates from numerous precincts for Saturday’s Democratic county conventions, particularly in Barack Obama's strongholds.
State Senate District 23, which includes much of southern Dallas County, was a central target of the Clinton campaign.
Just before Wednesday’s deadline to file complaints before the county convention credentials committee, Clinton campaign officials delivered a large packet of challenges.
"There are numerous challenges," said Dallas County District Clerk Gary Fitzsimmons, who is temporary chairman of the District 23 credentials committee. The district went solidly for Mr. Obama in the primary, and there’s a question over whether Mrs. Clinton will reach the 15 percent threshold needed to receive delegates.
The committee meets Thursday night to deal with minor challenges. The rest will be handled on Saturday, the day of the county conventions.
On a conference call Wednesday, Clinton campaign officials said they would not try to influence the county conventions with mass challenges before the credentials committee [...]
"Apparently the promise that the Clinton campaign made less than 24 hours ago not to challenge the seating of delegates at Saturday's district conventions was just another made-up story," [Obama spokesperson Josh] Earnest said. "The Clinton campaign's politically-motivated outrage over disenfranchising voters apparently doesn't extend to the 1.1 million Texans who participated in the precinct conventions earlier this month."
Of course it doesn't. Clinton originally agreed to the sanctions against Michigan and Florida. Yet now, even after the states have admitted they don't have the money, time, or political will to get new sanctioned contests, the Clinton campaign clings to the states in an effort to spread enough uncertainty to keep her failed campaign alive.
Note that in Texas, SD-23 in Dallas is little different than SD-13 in Houston -- Clinton got only about 27 percent of the vote, and only about 18 percent in the caucus. She's in danger of failing to reach viability there and in Houston's SD-13, and those are huge districts. Note also that the district, which the Clinton campaign is trying to disenfranchise, is essentially half African American, half Latino. But every delegate counts, and SD-23 has six of them. They'll fight for every single one of them no matter how many people and communities they disenfranchise.
There are also reports that several south Texas counties, Clinton territory, are refusing to publish the location of the conventions. In the old day, no one showed up to these things, delegate slates were just filled in without hassle by some local party honcho. These people would like nothing else than to fill in a full slate of Clinton delegates without the hassles of "democracy" and all. So between credential challenges and other subterfuge designed to depress Obama's performance and cast the caucus results in doubt, we'll see that once again, Camp Clinton will do and say anything in its mad pursuit of power.