On Sunday, in all 53 California congressional districts, caucuses will be held to choose delegates to the national convention. As you can imagine there is an unprecedented level of interest in being delegate this year, but what comes with that is an unprecedented interest among the two campaigns to make sure the delegates who are chosen are loyal to them in Denver.
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.
What's fascinating is who's doing the bulk of the purging.
Most of the cutting was done by Obama. His campaign dropped about 900 potential delegates, compared to about 50 excluded on Clinton's side.They "want to make sure the people who are running for delegate for their candidate are going to stay true to that candidate," said Roger Salazar, a Democratic operative running as a Clinton delegate. "If they see somebody who is a supporter of the other side, they are going to knock them off" the list.
Except that's not what the Obama campaign is doing at all. They're purging faithful hardworking supporters like my friend Brian at calitics.
Today, I learned that I have been pruned out of my delegate race. I will say that I didn't really expect to win. There were people in my district that were better organized and better known (Chris Daly). And they both made the cut. However, I didn't figure the campaign to whom I donated money, and to whom I traveled to two different states for, would decide that I wasn't loyal enough. Heck, I spent March 4 working for Buffy Wicks (the CA field director) in Texas at the Election Hotline.
This was all the buzz at the Darcy Burner event I attended last night among Obama supporters who feel like this move totally betrays the spirit of the campaign. As Lucas O'Connor said in the comments at calitics:
But with a campaign in which so much strength comes from the lack of top-down control and from the promise of empowerment, this knocks the wind out of a lot of sails, fairly or not.
David Dayen has this take on why this has been such a clusterfuck on the part of the Obama campaign.
The short answer is that activists aren't owed seats in Denver just because they're activists. It's perfectly legitimate for the Obama campaign to reward supporters who walked precincts, made phone calls, dropped lit, stayed up late at the campaign office, and generally did anything and everything logistically to help the candidate win California...Just being a good activist is not enough. You're actually not going to the convention to represent the party, you'd be going as an Obama or Clinton delegate, representing the candidate. Honestly, considering that there were about 1,000 precinct captains in California, if you weren't one, you shouldn't be an Obama delegate. Bottom line.What I and many of us object to is the haphazard, seemingly random standard applied here, where delegates with little or no ground experience remained on the ballot, while those with a lot didn't.
While I've written often about how the way the Obama campaign mobilizes supporters does put his money where his "change comes from the bottom up" mouth is, I have to say I've heard enough stories from dis-illusioned former Obama supporters to think that Obama's reputation as a candidate who eschews the top down model of running his campaign is actually an inaccurate one. This screw up would seem to give credence to that view.
At the very least, there is some real disappointment among the CA activist class toward the Obama campaign right now and some damage control is in order. I understand an explanation (apology?) is forthcoming, I'll update when I see it.
Update [2008-4-10 15:18:37 by Todd Beeton]:It should be noted that while Obama is purging far more people than Clinton is, he also has far more people running. From Brian again:
Clinton cut around 40-50 of her approximately 950 delegate candidates. Obama cut about 950 of about 1700 candidates.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a bloodbath for Obama activists, but this just provides some more context.
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