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.

There's more...

The final Rasmussen Reports poll out of Virginia (719 LVs, Feb. 6-7, MOE +/- 4%) concurs with the results of Survey USA's final poll (588 LVs, Feb. 7-8, MOE +/- 4.1%) showing Barack Obama with a double digit lead going into Tuesday's primary.

Ben Smith offers his analysis of the reality of Virginia's demographics.

The math is really pretty simple, and Patashnik mentions it: Black voters, in 2004, made up 33 perceent of the Democratic primary electorate. Obama has been getting more than 80 percent of the black vote virtually everywhere, a lot more in some places. So working off that conservative 80 percent figure, he only needs 36 percent of the white vote. That's a Deep South margin.

Survey USA has the African-American vote estimated at 28% of the entire electorate (goes to Obama 87-12) while Rasmussen sees him doing less well (72-22) but I can't get into the internals to see how much of the vote they anticipate African-Americans making up. Both polls show Clinton and Obama even among white voters.

What's notable is that Hillary Clinton, even with an expected rout, is competing hard in Virginia. Not only is Bill doing four townhalls today, and Hillary's schedule will be full over the coming days, but she is also up on the air here including ads featuring African-American icons Maya Angelou and Magic Johnson.

It appears the Clinton campaign feels of all of Tuesday's contests, Virginia offers the best opportunity for Clinton to peel off delegates from Obama. Check out Not Larry Sabato's in depth analysis of the possible delegate outcome on Tuesday (projection has 83 delegates split 49-34.) In addition, Clinton needs to try to prevent a result echoing that of other southern states with significant African-American populations, namely that Obama has far out-performed the polls time and time again.

There's more...