According to the Dallas Morning News, Barack Obama has won the Texas caucus, with 38 convention delegates, and though he lost the popular-vote count to Clinton (65 to 61 delegates), the combined total (including superdelegates) gives Obama 109 to Clinton's 106 delegates and thus, a win in Texas after all.
And the Clinton campaign has responded forcefully, demanding that the county conventions of March 29 be delayed, provoking this reaction from the Dallas New's popular "Trail Blazers" blog by Wayne Slater:
"The Hillary Clinton camp has tried every avenue to delay reporting on the delegates from the Texas primary. They tried to intimidate the Texas Democratic Party prior to the primary. That failed. On election night, they threw up a dust storm of objections about irregularities. Now, the Clinton camp is urging the state party to delay the March 29 county and senate conventions, where details of how 67 delegates picked in the county caucuses will be announced.
"Why are they doing this? Because they are losing."
After reporting the delegate tallies, Slater reproduces the letter sent by the Clinton campaign to the chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, and concludes:
"Hillary Clinton declared victory in Texas and moved on. As for these pesky details, like delegates, that's the last thing the Clinton campaign wants to talk about."
It would seem that the Clinton campaign's triumphant brag about winning Texas might prove, after all, to have been premature.
Even more disturbing, when it comes to popular vote-count in Texas, which allows Republicans to cross over and vote in the Democratic primary, is this trend documented by the Boston Globe:
"For a party that loves to hate the Clintons, Republican voters have cast an awful lot of ballots lately for Senator Hillary Clinton: About 100,000 GOP loyalists voted for her in Ohio, 119,000 in Texas, and about 38,000 in Mississippi, exit polls show.
"A sudden change of heart? Hardly.
"Since Senator John McCain effectively sewed up the GOP nomination last month, Republicans have begun participating in Democratic primaries specifically to vote for Clinton, a tactic that some voters and local Republican activists think will help their party in November. With every delegate important in the tight Democratic race, this trend could help shape the outcome if it continues in the remaining Democratic primaries open to all voters.
"Spurred by conservative talk radio, GOP voters who say they would never back Clinton in a general election are voting for her now for strategic reasons: Some want to prolong her bitter nomination battle with Barack Obama, others believe she would be easier to beat than Obama in the fall, or they simply want to register objections to Obama."
What is disturbing about this is that Clinton won the popular vote in Texas by about 100,000 votes--which would be easily handled by the Republican cross-over votes.
Exit surveys taken of voters demonstrated that the Republicans who voted for Obama generally did so because they were disgruntled with the Republican party and felt he would represent a fresh change.
However, those voting for Clinton, by a 75% majority, claimed to have been doing so for strategic reasons, to benefit the Republican party in November. None of those voters intended to vote for Hillary Clinton in the fall.
Though the Clinton campaign has attempted to spin these findings by boasting that Republicans were impressed with her tough-on-security stance and were crossing over because they genuinely felt she would be the strongest candidate in November, exit polling and research conducted by the Globe indicates quite the opposite.
Meanwhile, in its letter sent to the Texas Democratic Party, the Clinton campaign demanded that the county convention official delegate vote-count be postponed, claiming that the "true vote count has been distorted by violations of the Party's rules."
One of those "violations" claimed by the Clinton campaign was: "Failure to follow Robert's Rules of Order at the precinct convention."
They also protested, among other things, to the practice in rural areas such as mine, to consolidate precincts.
Had we not consolidated, we'd've had to have me and the other guy meet at a community center in the middle of a cotton field. Other precincts in our county would have had to gather two or three people in isolated areas as well. The busiest precinct group we had in the whole county had six people in attendance.
If the Clinton campaign seriously believes that they can claim such "violations" as grounds to postpone the legitimate Texas vote count, well, as my tough old grandmother (she always used to sign her letters "Grand Mother")--used to say:
"If you think that, missy, you got another think comin'."