But that wasn’t the whole story.
While the Clinton camp was heartened by the report–which essentially allowed them to say that if they were wrong to poach, so was Obama–Team Obama was not. Obama spokesman Bill Burton quickly contacted me to say that the postcard in question was mistakenly sent to a Clinton delegate–not, as I previously believed, to the entire list of Texas county delegates, regardless of affiliation. “The Texas Democratic Party gave us a list of delegates that indicated him as an Obama delegate–which is why he got the errant post card,” he says. “The suggestion that we have a passive strategy of trying to flip Clinton’s pledged delegates by sending one postcard to one guy is pretty ludicrous on its face.”
I absolutely agreed–if that was, in fact, what happened. So I did some digging. This morning, I finally got to the bottom of the brouhaha–or as close to bottom, it seems, as anyone can get.
Turns out that the Obama campaign was correct to claim that the Clinton delegate in question, Christopher Cohen, was misidentified on their working list as an Obama supporter. I have obtained a copy of the spreadsheet and double-checked his entry. Not only that, but three other Clinton supporters who have contacted me to complain about receiving Obama postcards are ALSO identified on the aforementioned spreadsheet as Obama delegates. So the Obama campaign was, in fact, working off a flawed list, and that explains why Cohen and his fellow Clintonites received Obama postcards, which the Obama camp maintains were intended only for their own delegates.
That said, Cohen and the two of the other delegates in question are listed correctly–that is, as pro-Clinton, not pro-Obama–on the website of the Travis County Democrats. Why the discrepancy? Blame the middleman. According to spokesman Hector Nieto of the Texas Democratic Party, “the information that we gave to the campaigns was information given to us by the individual precincts. We then sent that information to a contractor to key it in to a spreadsheet. There’s a possibility that an error was made when the information was keyed in.” In other words, the precincts reported the correct candidate affiliations to the state party, but an outside contractor likely screwed up when entering those affiliations into a single spreadsheet –meaning that the Clinton and Obama campaigns received lists that incorrectly displayed at least a few Clinton delegates pledged to Obama (and perhaps vice versa).
I was basing my original item on the affiliations posted to the Travis County Democrats website, which list Cohen (and two other delegates who received Obama postcards) as Clinton supporters; at the time, it appeared that Obama was knowingly asking his rival’s delegates for support. But now it’s clear that the Obama campaign received a spreadsheet indicating that these three delegates were pro-Obama, and thus it’s only fair to conclude that Obama is not, as my headline suggested, playing the passive delegate-‘poaching’ game. Only Clinton–with her robocalls, which started in Iowa and continue in Texas–is on the prowl.
