Is Hillary's Campaign Planning to Manipulate Pledged Delegates?
February 19, 2008
The Politico has a potentially controversial story by Roger Simon which leaves me wondering where the story is. The title certainly caught my attention: Clinton Targets Pledged Delegates. The logic here is that Clinton's strategy of going after super delegates is running into trouble with all the talk of how it would split the party if the super delegates go against the will of the delegates won by the candidates in caucuses and primaries. The next step would be to get pledged delegates to change their support so that the super delegates would not be voting contrary to the pledged delegates.
This is theoretically possible as there is nothing which legally prevents a delegate from changing their vote. Even if legal, this would be as potentially divisive as Clinton's strategy of going after the super delegates.
If this is true, it would be yet another serious problem which would harm the credibility of the Clinton campaign. However, after reading beyond the head line, I'm not certain there really is a story here at all.
The article has a couple of quotes from the Clinton campaign, but I would really like to see the full context of any interviews to determine if this is really their plan or if spokes people simply responded to some leading questions. Early in the article, the author states:
This is theoretically possible as there is nothing which legally prevents a delegate from changing their vote. Even if legal, this would be as potentially divisive as Clinton's strategy of going after the super delegates.
If this is true, it would be yet another serious problem which would harm the credibility of the Clinton campaign. However, after reading beyond the head line, I'm not certain there really is a story here at all.
The article has a couple of quotes from the Clinton campaign, but I would really like to see the full context of any interviews to determine if this is really their plan or if spokes people simply responded to some leading questions. Early in the article, the author states:
This strategy was confirmed to me by a high-ranking Clinton official on Monday. And I am not talking about superdelegates, those 795 party big shots who are not pledged to anybody. I am talking about getting pledged delegates to switch sides.I would like to see more detail on the line that "the strategy was confirmed to me." The quotes in the remainder of the story are not strong enough to be considered confirmation. Later there is the comment:
