Clinton, Obama supporters wrangle over delegates

HOUSTON -- Less than a month ago, Texas Democrats turned out in huge numbers for the presidential nominating contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, confident that, no matter who won, the party would have a popular, well-financed candidate.

But that exuberance is gone now.

 

Across the state this weekend, tense confrontations -- even shoving matches -- erupted as partisans for Clinton and Obama battled over how to interpret the March 4 election results and how to choose delegates to the Texas Democratic convention.

At one particularly raucous session Saturday at Texas Southern University, a leading Clinton backer, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, was booed by hundreds of Obama supporters, and police were called later to break up heated exchanges that left some in tears.

"It's bedlam," said Houston lawyer Daniel J. Shea, a Clinton backer.

Democrat-on-Democrat clashes over delegates have been playing out in Iowa, Colorado, Florida and other states -- the latest indication that the feel-good nomination race of the era has veered into a political ditch.

The contentious battle in Texas shows the high cost of this unending campaign. To hold his delegate lead, Obama has kept a team of 65 paid organizers and lawyers in the state this month, while Clinton has 45.

As the feud rages -- even in states that voted weeks or months ago -- each side has its own game plan for victory. For Obama, it means highlighting his lead in delegates to the party's national convention in Denver. For Clinton, it means lengthening the campaign so that she can use every tactic to narrow her delegate deficit and to win upcoming primaries in her bid to raise doubts about Obama's electability in the fall.

The candidates have also become far more combative, and that hostility has party leaders worried. In a year that looked to be a Democratic romp, Obama and Clinton are burning money, erasing goodwill and eviscerating each other's reputation while the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, prepares to kick off his general-election campaign with a nationwide tour designed to highlight of military and congressional experience. On Saturday, Clinton told the Washington Post that she was prepared to take her campaign all the way to the party convention in August.

"This thing has turned from being an adventure to being a grind," said Robert M. Shrum, a Democratic strategist who managed John F. Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign.

Polls published last week showed some of the dangers: McCain has gained ground against both Democrats, and at least 20% of each Democratic candidate's supporters now say they would consider abandoning the party in November if their candidate is not the nominee.

The potential for anger is more pronounced -- and the consequences more dire -- than in most campaigns because this contest is being waged along the fault lines of gender and race, with the would-be first female president versus the would-be first black president.

That was starkly evident Saturday at one convention in Houston, where mostly white Clinton supporters repeatedly challenged the credentials of black Obama backers in a heavily black district that had voted overwhelmingly for Obama. Democratic leaders, who had been thrilled by the massive turnout in early-voting states, now fear the consequences not only in the presidential race but also in state and local ones.

"When you have a divided party, I think it hurts you up and down the ticket," said Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, who said his party cannot afford to lose seats in an evenly divided state Senate and a state House controlled by a narrow Democratic majority. "Somebody who's mad enough at one of the candidates to want to vote for John McCain is more likely to [vote] down that side of the ballot."

Bredesen has circulated a plan to stave off a potentially divisive national nominating convention in August by holding a "primary" earlier this summer among the nearly 800 superdelegates -- the party's elected officials, leaders and activists -- whose votes could decide the race and forestall the type of delegate fights now unfolding in Texas.

Another party elder, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, proposed Saturday that Clinton and Obama avert a "disaster" by agreeing to share the ticket, with the delegate winner running for president and the loser for vice president.

"If, on the other hand, the candidates refuse to work out a way to keep both constituencies firmly in the Democratic camp for the general election," Cuomo wrote in the Boston Globe, "the 2008 primary may be the story of a painfully botched grand opportunity to return our nation to the upward path and [instead] leave us mired in Iraq and government mediocrity."

Such concern prompted one prominent U.S. senator, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, an Obama supporter, to call Friday for Clinton to step aside, while Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean urged the candidates to find a resolution by July.

The acrimony was on sharp display Saturday in Texas as Democrats met in 280 district conventions, part of the complicated system the state uses to determine the makeup of its delegation to the national convention.

Clinton won the primary in Texas, but Obama won the caucuses that followed after the polls closed. It was those caucus results that were being challenged Saturday at conventions that drew thousands of boisterous participants.