Miscellaneous

Maybe it's just time for Hillary to roll over and die

Tomorrow is a big primary day, with Hillary looking for must-wins in Texas and Ohio. Now it turns out that Texas has quite a confuzzing system that's a weird mix of primary, caucus and "don't mess with Texas." The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder provides a sorta-explanation of the whole two-step process, which involves a vote that ends up proportionally awarding 126 Democratic delegates, followed by a caucus which awards an additional 67 delegates. While I try to keep myself pretty informed, I'll admit that I didn't learn about this cockamamey system until late last month, when a friend of our sister site pointed out that Hillary's campaign strategists only recently realized that this complicated system (a) was complicated and (b) might favor Obama because of where folks live in the state.

How they didn't understand this shit and plan for it much earlier, in a campaign that's been in the works for fucking years, is beyond me. But that they're now coming out and whining and bitching about it is just preposterous. Last week, Clinton aides started talking about how alarmed they were that the caucus rules were so unclear. They then raised the threat of litigation, which has the Texas Democratic Party bracing for a lawsuit which could delay or disrupt the state's primary caucuses. Hillary's political director denies that there's a plan to sue the state party, but at this point, I wouldn't put it past them. It would be terrible for the party and terrible for this election race, but Hillary seems to only care about winning so, you know, whatever with all that.

Full post as published by Quiz Law on March 03, 2008 (boomark / email).