California Delegation Meeting in Sacramento

If you want to know how the California Delegation Meeting in Sacramento on May 18 went, check out this HuffPo piece by William Bradley. Just so you know, I was there. Steve Westly led us in a rousing cheer of "Yes, We Can," after all the 107 or so Obama delegates had gone around the room and introduced themselves and stated where they were from, as the Obama facilitator asked. They did that all right, but also discussed which district they represented, what cities the district covers, how they were involved in the Obama campaign, what other political efforts they were involved in, what posts they held in various official and non-official organizations, etc. Twice we were asked to keep it short. (I had spoken near the beginning, so I was under no such time pressure.) Any time you ask a group of activist Democrats to stand up and talk, you know it's not going to be short!

Iowa, Nevada … Texas?

Did you see that Obama picked up another national delegate in Nevada on Saturday? The campaign’s tactical organization at the county- and state-level caucuses and conventions continues to deliver results. Can they do it again in Texas on June 7?

Since the day after the Texas two-step primary/caucus, the Obama campaign has claimed to have won 38 delegates in the Texas caucuses, in addition to the 61 in the Texas primary (a total of 99 to Clinton’s 94). On the other hand, The Green Papers (and hence DemConWatch) has been showing Obama with 37 caucus delegates ever since the Texas County Conventions on March 30. This appears to be because his percentage of state convention delegates that were chosen at the county conventions is just short of the threshold to earn that 38th delegate.

Curious, I emailed Stephanie Leavitt, the Deputy Finance Director of the Texas Democratic Party, to find out the number of delegates to the Texas State Democratic Convention on June 5-7. The answer is 7298 delegates. (FWIW, that number does not include the State Democratic Executive Committee and County Chairs.)

Back on March 30, Burnt Orange Report, at this diary, was all over the County Conventions, in which those state delegates were chosen. There are some instructive comments attached to the BOR diary. There I learned this information:

On June 7 the state convention delegates will elect 25 PLEO (Party Leaders and Elected Officials) delegates and 42 at-large delegates using separate election criteria. But if you consider the PLEO and at-large delegates together, the threshold percentages required for election of national delegates becomes clear. With final numbers for Obama between 50 and 60% and with 7298 state convention delegates, the key numbers are:

53.572% (3910 state delegates) => 36 national delegates
54.001% (3941 state delegates) => 37
55.953% (4084 state delegates) => 38
58.001% (4233 state delegates) => 39
58.334% (4258 state delegates) => 40

Based on the Burnt Orange Report spreadsheet, Obama has 4040 state convention delegates to Clinton’s 3318. Obama’s share is 55.4% of the 7298 total.

But note that sum of Clinton and Obama state delegates is 7358, not 7298. Perhaps there was some attrition in the final delegate count. In fact, BOR’s spreadsheet shows that some counties elected too many delegates. In any event, assuming that Obama alone had to shed all 60 of the “excess” state delegates, Obama’s minimum would be 3980 delegates (54.5%), still firmly ensconced with at least 37 national delegates.

Also note that in its spreadsheet, BOR reports for Senate District 29 in El Paso County:

To be 'challenged' at the TDP convention, resulting in around 22 more delegates for Obama.

The quote marks around the word 'challenged' seems to indicate that this will be a mere formality. Adding 22 to the 4040 Obama delegates gives 4062. This is just short of the 4084 delegates needed to pick up 38 delegates.

Can Obama snag that 38th delegate that his campaign has been claiming all along? Obama would need somewhere in the range of 22 to 82 Clinton state delegates to switch to him on June 7 to grab it.

Is the Obama campaign counting on their superb organizational skills, as evidenced recently in Nevada and Iowa, to pick up an extra national delegate or two in Texas? We’ll see on June 7.

Obama Mystery Delegates - We Need Detective Work!

Has anyone noticed that the pledged delegate totals on the Obama website differ from the those on the DKos front page (which are obtained from DemConWatch, which gets the numbers from The Green Papers). The Obama campaign claims three more delegates than DCW and GP show, one each in Lousiana, Texas, and Washington.

The reason Obama does not get "official" credit for these delegates is because of missing data. It's likely that a few people are holding it close to the vest. Also, DCW even suggests that "something fishy" may be going on in Lousiana.

The challenge for us is to use our collective detective work to pry this data loose. By doing this, we could nail down 1, 2 or even 3 more pledged delegates in the "official" count for Obama.

DemConWatch says there is good reason to believe that the Obama count could be right in all three cases.

According to a May 1 post on DemConWatch, there is good reason to believe that the Obama count could be right in all three of these cases.

Here is where the discrepancies lie:

State:	Obama Campaign	DCW/GP	Possible Obama Pick-up
Louisiana	34-22	33-23	+1
Texas	38-29	37-30	+1
Washington	53-25	52-26	+1

From DemConWatch:

LA: GP suggest 33:23 due to official source, Obama has it 34:22; the official source can't explain why they have one more delegate for Clinton in CD2, also they don't give the final numbers CD-by-CD; IMHO - something fishy, probably the campaign has filed an appeal and that is why [the Obama campaign is sticking] with the correct (IMHO) 34:22 result.

TX: caucus results are still not final so both sources have different projection - campaign has 99:94, GP has 98:95 (more probable if the race is not over before June 7th)

WA: again different projections GP has 52:26, Obama campaign has 53:25; our experts here found that at-large and PLEOs in the state are not allocated based on popular vote, they are chosen by the CD pledged delegates; that makes 53:25 impossible projection and most probable projections are 52:26 and 54:24 (less probable); I am making attempts to find all LD conventions results and predict the outcome of the CD conventions, but results are very hard to obtain...

This calls for some sleuthing by people on the ground in Louisiana, Texas, and Washington.

In Louisiana, we need to find out the final vote tally in CD2. This will determine whether one of the CD2 pledged delegates that is now counted for Clinton should really be for Obama. Right now the count DCW count shows CD-2 at Obama 3, Clinton 2. It might really be 4-1. Also, we need to know if the Obama campaign has in fact filed an appeal.

Texas has a 3-tier system of conventions to determine the split of caucus delegates. The State (Tier 3) Convention on June 7 will identify the persons who will be the 67 caucus-chosen delegates. In Texas, we need the final caucus results coming out of the County and Senate District (Tier 2) Conventions that were held on March 29. This will help determine if the split will be 38-29 (as the Obama campaign says) or 37-30. Green Papers bases their estimated 37-30 split based on incomplete numbers from Burnt Orange Report:

Here is how we estimate the STATEWIDE delegate count (based on partial and unofficial results of the 30 March 2008 County Conventions from Burnt Orange Report as of 7 April 2008 with 93.90% of the delegate's presidential preferences indicated):

In the end we will know the final split in Texas on June 7:

Friday 6 June - Saturday 7 June 2008: The State Convention will choose the remaining 67 pledged delegates. ... 67 delegates are to be allocated to presidential contenders based on the presidential preference of the delegates at the State Convention as a whole.
42 at-large National Convention delegates
25 Pledged PLEOs

Washington also has a three-tier caucus system to select national delegates. There are 17 at-large and 10 PLEO (Party Leaders and Elected Officials) delegates to be chosen at the State Convention on Saturday, June 15. These are all part of the 78 national delegates that were at stake on February in the Washington caucuses.

In order to predict how these 27 will be split, we would need all the Legislative District (LD) caucus results from April 19. Apparently these LD caucus-chosen delegates make up something called the Election Committee, and it is this committee who will choose the final 27 national pledged delegates on June 15:

Sunday 15 June 2008: State Convention. The delegates to the Election Committee choose the remaining delegates to the National Convention. 27 pledged delegates are to be allocated to presidential contenders based on the presidential preferences of the Election Committee as a whole. ...
17 at-large National Convention delegates
10 Pledged PLEOs

Can anyone in the great state of Washington help out here? Even if you could find out the results of just one of the LD caucuses from April 19, that would help.

Your Instructions
Detectives, please post your clues in the comments below (bookmark this diary so you can find it later). Also, you should post any good information directly to this site for the nice people at DemConWatch.

OK, detectives, get going, and remember, let's be careful out there!

P.S.: You might also notice that the "official" count includes an extra delegate from Maryland for Obama that Obama's website does not show. This is because yesterday a pledged Clinton delegate flipped to Obama!

Cross posted at Daily Kos.

New Magic Number after May 6

The results below are based on the Obama website, with the Dems Abroad split corrected from 5-2 to 4.5-2.5.

Delegates:	Pledged	Super	Total	Needed
Obama	1,592.5	259	1,851.5	172.5
Clinton	1,424.5	276	1,700.5	323.5
Remaining	217	260	477
(2,024.5 delegates needed for victory)

Tonight Obama clinched a majority of pledged delegates

With tonight's results in Indiana and North Carolina, Barack Obama has now clinched a majority of pledged delegates. He won 66 in NC and 34 in IN.

After today there are 37 mini-races left in the remaining primary states and PR. Obama will be viable in all of them.

The percentage threshold for viability is very low, and Obama has been viable in every single district in the country where delegates have been awarded. That means the bare minimum number of pledged delegates he will get in the last six primaries is 37.

That, together with tonight's results, put him over the 1627 delegates needed to win a majority of the pledged delegates.

• The Obama website says that he has 1593 pledged delegates after tonight. Add 37 and that is 1630.
  
  
• If you use the Obama pledged total from the Green Papers, which is 1589.5 and then add 37, the result is 1626.5. Demconwatch uses GP as its source, so they show exactly what GP shows, by hook or by crook.
  
  
• However, Amot, one of the Demconwatch bloggers, made a convincing case that the real Obama total was 1.5 more than what GP showed at the time of Amot's posting. GP had shown America Samoa and Louisiana as having 0.5 and 1 fewer Obama delegates, respectively, than he believed was correct. GP now has the correct AS split of 2-1. So just correct for LA (i.e., add 1) so that 1590.5 is the Obama total, in which case 37 more is 1627.5.
  
  
• GP also shows 1 fewer Obama delegate each for Texas and Washington, as well as 0.5 delegate less for Democrats Abroad, as compared to Obama's site. Amot says that the results of the caucuses in those two states are not final yet, and apparently GP and Obama have different sources. He also says that the 4.5 - 2.5 split for DA is correct, not the 5-2 split that Obama's site has. So subtract 2.5 from 1593 to get 1590.5, which agrees with the previous bullet item.
  

The Magic Number after Guam and LA-6

We have a new superdelegate today after Don Cazayoux won the special election in Louisiana-6, in a district that Democrats ordinarily would not win.

The results below are based on the Obama website.

Delegates:	Pledged	Super	Total	Needed
Obama	1,494	258	1,752	273
Clinton	1,336	275	1,611	414
Remaining	404	263	667
(2,025 delegates needed for victory)

The Magic Number

The Magic Number
Based on http://origin.barackobama.com/resultscenter as of May 2.

The Magic Number(2,024 delegates needed)
Barack Obama	1,747	278
Hillary Clinton	1,608	417

My 3 Top Issues: Poverty, Health Care, War

(After I was elected as an Obama pledged delegate, the Obama campaign asked me to fill out an information form. One question asked me to explain my top three issues. Below is my response.)

Basic principles drive my positions on the issues. Jesus the Christ directs us to Love God, Love our Neighbor, Help the Poor, and Help the Outcast. As a result, the three issues that are most important to me are poverty, healthcare and the Iraq war.

• Why should any child suffer from poverty, hunger and lack of health care, when we, the wealthiest nation in the world, have the resources and the means to eradicate suffering among our most vulnerable citizens, our nation’s children, who have no voices?

• For 47 million Americans to be without health insurance, and for a very high proportion of them to be children, is just plain wrong. Even in the absence of this shocking truth, for our government to deny the basic dignity of health care for all of its citizens is an immoral transgression.

• Why should we continue to squander our treasure and the lives of our military heroes in Iraq at outrageous expense to our society? If we instead used these precious resources wisely, think of the social injustices that could be effectively addressed, the societal good that that could be procured, and the wrongs that could be made right, most of it here within our own borders.

My views on poverty, the war, healthcare and government’s role are exemplified by the following quotations:

• “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” – Thomas Jefferson
  
  
• “Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.” – Edmund Burke
  
  
• “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.” – Jane Addams
  
  
• “Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” – Paulo Freire
  
  
• “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke
  
  
• “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – MLK Jr.
  
  
• “Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.” – Edmund Burke
  
  
• “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – MLK Jr.
  

Poverty:

• “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” – FDR
  
  
• “For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. …Then these righteous ones will reply, `Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you?’ Or thirsty and give you something to drink? … And the King will tell them, `I assure you, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!’ ” – The Gospel of Matthew
  
  
• “Of course people cannot contribute to the nation if they are never taught to read or write; if their bodies are stunted from hunger; if their sickness goes untended; if their life is spent in hopeless poverty, just drawing a welfare check.
  
  “So we want to open the gates to opportunity. But we're also going to give all our people, black and white, the help that they need to walk through those gates. My first job after college was as a teacher in Cotulla, Texas, in a small Mexican-American school. Few of them could speak English and I couldn't speak much Spanish. My students were poor and they often came to class without breakfast and hungry. And they knew even in their youth the pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them, but they knew it was so because I saw it in their eyes.
  
  “I often walked home late in the afternoon after the classes were finished wishing there was more that I could do. But all I knew was to teach them the little that I knew, hoping that I might help them against the hardships that lay ahead. And somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.” – Lyndon B. Johnson

War:

• “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.” – MLK Jr.

• “Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.” – MLK Jr.

Healthcare:

• “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” – MLK Jr.

Obama vs Clinton Health Care Plans

As I said that I would do in my last post, I have studied and compared the high-level information on the health insurance plans of both Clinton and Obama. Just as I was finishing this post, I read the following:

Regardless of the Presidential campaign and proposals, it is important to have strong better options coming out of Congress.

Here are the four simple questions to ask of any health care proposal:

1. Is it Universal (covers all people)... but just that is not enough, you must also find out how the proposal deals with items 2, 3 & 4:

2. Is it Comprehensive (does it cover all needed conditions, prevention, treatment)?

3. How much is it going to Cost Individuals; is it affordable year-in and year-out and can you afford to get sick (their total cost in taxes, premiums, deductibles, copays, uncovered conditions/expenses, total out of pocket...)?

4. How much is it going to Cost Overall, total cost of the system to the country (and yes, we do need overall cost-control); and how is it paid for, and who is paying, all the pieces, direct and indirect?

As it turns out, these are also the concerns that I had in mind and that shaped my analysis. For that analysis, I used the side-by-side comparison found here. The comparison breaks out the provisions of each plan in 13 categories.

I think the merits of each plan can best be assessed by digging deep into the details to a greater degree than is presented at the link above. However, I have based my comparison on the information at this link, and it still took me a fair amount of time to do so. So of course, there are questions that I have that would require still more detailed information to answer (the devil is in the details, as they say). But I will use what I have, which I think is more than most voters would stop to consider.

I copied the table at the link into a Word document and appended an extra column in which I entered my comments. I also inserted some of my questions in the text as I was reading through the document, using the Insert, Comment menu function. These can be viewed by selecting the View, Markup menu function or the Show, Reviewing Pane function on the Reviewing Toolbar.

I used yellow highlighting for provisions that I considered most noteworthy. I used other highlight colors to point out some important provisions in both plans that are similar or identical to each other.

Based on my comparison, there are four important categories in which I judge that Clinton’s plan has an advantage over Obama’s plan, based solely on the information in the document. These are:

• Expanding access to coverage
• Premium subsidies to individuals
• Premium subsidies to employers
• Changes to private insurance

On the other hand, I am concerned about the effect of each plan on the national deficit. The estimated cost of Clinton’s plan when fully phased in is $110 billion per year. At that level, I wonder how we will prevent the deficit from ballooning even further out-of-control. My hope is that we as a nation would have the political will to re-set our national priorities to emphasize health care for all over war and dubious, unnecessary, multi-billion dollar weapons programs.

Obama’s plan is estimated to cost about half of Clinton’s plan. If economists and accountants agree that it actually would cost that amount, then that fact could make it more politically palatable in order to get it passed. I am still skittish about the 1994 collapse of national health care. The best plan in the world isn’t worth anything if we can’t get it passed into law.

Is Clinton’s plan far-and-away better than Obama’s? I don’t think so. However, based on what I now know, I do judge Clinton’s plan overall to be the better plan.

"Why are you for Obama rather than for Clinton?"

In my campaigning to be elected as a California Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention, one of the people I contacted by email wrote back:

Can you explain why you're for Obama rather than for Clinton?

I will be honest--and I'm embarrassed to admit it--but I know very little about their platforms. I know that Paul Krugman thinks that Clinton's health plan will cover twice as many people as Obama's. That seems very important. Also, heard on the news today that Obama's (military?) adviser thinks that the Iraq pull-out should start in 2010.

If you've campaigned so furiously for Obama, you must think he is the better candidate--and I assume that you think that he will put better policies in place.

What about beating McCain? My feeling is that Clinton would have a better shot at beating McCain.

Since you are so active politically, why not have an email list of like-minded acquaintances who you communicate regularly with? I would like to be on that email list!

Here is how I replied:

The last week (before April 13) has been kind of crazy. I was at the San Joaquin County Democratic Central Committee on Saturday, Alameda County Central Labor Council on Monday, Stockton Democratic Club on Tuesday and the Tracy Democratic Club tonight. The good part is that things are looking really positive for the election in which I am running.

I picked up some voter lists at the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters office when I was there yesterday. These are for the precincts surrounding Williams Middle School in Tracy. On Saturday we will be walking the neighborhood asking Democrats that live near the school to come on out and vote for Lea (Austin, my “slate-mate”) and me.

Our party is blessed to have had three great candidates, each of whom could have made or will make an excellent president, or even be among the greatest presidents. I have the utmost respect for all three of them, including Senator Clinton. I do not seek to disparage any of our candidates. I would have voted and will proudly vote for any one of them
as our party's nominee.

You raise some good questions, and that led me to dig up some information that compares the healthcare plans of the three people left standing. I will study that information carefully. I think that both of the Democratic plans are far superior to what we have now.

As for troop pullout from Iraq, everything I have heard from Obama's own mouth says it would start in 2009.

Yes, I do think that Obama is the better candidate, in fact the one candidate that would be able to lead our country in the new direction that it desperately needs to go. I think that his policies would be more progressive than those of the Democratic Leadership Council to which Senator Clinton belongs. The DLC is a centrist organization that operates mostly to the detriment of the necessary future direction of the Democratic Party, in my opinion.

A big factor in my support of Obama is his judgment. I have the utmost confidence in his judgment to say and do the best thing in any given situation. I also admire his world-view, largely based on his childhood upbringing, as well as his innate vision of what our country can become and what needs to be done to get us there. I believe he will restore our integrity among the community of nations. I think he will demonstrate bold vision as president and implement bold initiatives, and even accomplish these things with bipartisan support. His can be a transformative presidency, rising above the partisanship that wreaks havoc in Washington, and leading others above it as well. Unfortunately, I think that Senator Clinton suffers from too much negative perception among many Americans, and that would seriously impair her ability to accomplish the same thing.

On the electability question, I feel strongly that Obama will beat McCain and that Clinton would have a much tougher fight against McCain than Obama. I have talked to people, including Republicans, and observed polling results that show that Obama will draw significant support from independents and even Republicans, which would not be the case for Senator Clinton.

By the way, I am not trying to win over Clinton supporters to vote for me instead of attending their own caucus. Each presidential candidate already has a determined number of delegate positions, and I figure that it would be an honor and a privilege for me to fill one of Obama's slots and represent the 11th Congressional District as one of Barrack Obama's pledged delegates.

As for communicating with other like-minded acquaintances on a regular basis, I will most definitely be doing that on Kephalos!

Obama's Army

Current TV is showing their footage of Obama's Texas operation. Check out that woman in a cowboy hat about 2 1/2 minutes in. Is that Maggie Fleming?

Great, inspiring video:

http://current.com/items/88906122_obama_s_army

Poor Judgment

Who is the epitome of poor judgment?

From lawprofessor at DailyKos:

From here on out, Dems, and especially Obama, who has made his own good judgment a major campaign theme, should be tying McCain to the phrase "poor judgment."

As one of the Keating Five, McCain was officially
reprimanded for having "poor judgment."

He showed poor judgment in supporting the decision to invade Iraq and continues to show poor judgment in wanting to stay there.

He shows poor judgment in continuing to embrace and validate the poor judgments of a president with a 19% approval rating. And the very most charitable characterization of the NYT revelations is that McCain has consistently exercised poor judgment in his association with lobbyists.

"Maybe they're just not into you."

Karen Tumulty of Time has an online article that quotes a senior Democratic strategist close to the Clinton campaign. I think the strategist hits the nail on the head. It's what I've been thinking for some time (emphasis mine):

But it's possible that the most difficult problem is not Obama; it could be Clinton. How can she retool her message — and her identity as a virtual incumbent — to resonate with an electorate that seems to yearn more for change than any other quality? Says one longtime Democratic strategist, who is close to the Clintons: "Fundamentally, she is who she is; she can't change who she is, and maybe this is not her time."

Disclosure: I support Barack Obama, and I am a volunteer for his California campaign.