Progressive activist and candidate Marcy Winograd alleged earlier today in a diary that the Obama campaign was purging Progressives from its California convention delegate lists.
By dusk on Wednesday, the California Obama campaign had purged almost all
progressive anti-war activists from its delegate candidate lists. Names of candidates, people who had filed to run to represent Obama at the August Democratic Party National Convention, disappeared, not one by one, but hundreds at a time, from the Party web site listing the eligibles. [...] Gone were strong women with independent political bases.
There's a purge going on, but it's not what Ms. Winograd suspects.
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The Associated Press:
Barack Obama's and Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaigns are purging potential California delegates to ensure that only their loyalists vote at the national convention that will crown one of them as the Democratic presidential nominee.
Locked in a race with an uncertain outcome, representatives for both camps this week directed the California Democratic Party to remove dozens of names from the lists of more than 2,000 potential delegates. Party caucuses scheduled for Sunday will elect a slate of delegates for each candidate.
Driven by fears that some prospective delegates might be concealing their true allegiances, the campaigns are searching campaign finance data, scouring the Internet and making telephone calls to weed out dubious candidates.
There is a reason for everything, including this:
Clinton trails Obama both in the popular vote and in pledged delegates, and has said she will take her fight for the nomination to Denver if necessary. Clinton also has hinted that hopes to persuade some of Obama's delegates to switch sides and back her instead.
"There is no such thing as a pledged delegate," she said last week.
Marcy Winograd is a great Progressive and a true leader on our issues. That does not mean she can't be wrong on occasion; and in this case, fortunately, she is. The test being applied by the Obama campaign to its California delegates is not one of Progressivism, it's the rather simpler one of reliability in the face of attempts at delegate poaching.