BTD posted The Primary Wars this morning before we Californians were out of bed, so I'll post my thoughts here.
The prelude to the caucus story is that it has never been told except among witnesses and loyalists because the press didn't report the Hillary campaign's allegations, much less interview any witnesses or review any documents - you know, journalism.
All sides admit that the press was heavily biased in favor of Obama and against Hillary. This came into play at every turn, since the media was unwilling to do normal investigations, and crafted conventional wisdom that Obama was pure and Hillary would "knee cap" an opponent. The Hillary campaign did issue press releases effectively alleging systematic voter fraud by the Obama organization, but even these explosive, unprecedented complaints were disappeared from the initial version of history. The silence of the reporting was so pervasive that most Hillary people never heard about the Nevada press release. There was nothing more the Hillary campaign could have said to get the attention of the media that wouldn't have created a backlash from the institutions that were fully invested in Obama's story.
Here's modified version of the thumbnail sketch I wrote in response to BTD's belief that Obama did not rig any part of the primary process, which he hasn't yet responded to.
How Obama Stole Caucus Delegates
If you haven't done so yet, please listen to the witnesses in the film I helped produce, We Will Not Be Silenced.
What these people say mirrors what we know about the Alice Palmer race, that Obama's organizers used procedural techniques to cheat the voters. In the Il state Senate race, Obama operatives knocked all of his primary challengers, including Senator Palmer, off the ballot by challenging petition signatures. He did this at the last minute, so there was not adequate time fight the challenges. I'm told that after Obama was successful, Palmer knocked on every single door of her rejected voters, and found that each one was legal. Palmer campaigned for Hillary. (Here's the CNN account of the controversy.)
In our film, a witness in Iowa says how Obama people pumped up their own tally, and suppressed Hillary numbers. In a caucus, this is perfectly legal, since any challenge would be heard by a majority-Obama committee, not a district attorney. This was a common story. Staff and volunteers repeat the same basic story, that in caucuses where Obama operatives controlled the check-in desk or otherwise controlled the caucus, they padded their numbers by waiving through Obama supporters, and stonewalling people who were likely to be Hillary supporters, like the elderly women mentioned in the film.
This pattern continued through every caucus state, and the press strenuously ignored it. In Nevada, there was similar systematic fabrication of Obama votes and suppression of Hillary votes. I have an affidavit that makes people cry, an account of Obama organizers threatening the job of a Hispanic service worker with her job, in front of her child - one of many such stories.
In Washington state, party leaders issued direction to not check ID in neighborhoods friendly to Obama. In Kansas, with huge 4+ thousand person caucus sites, there are no records to audit allegations that OFA organizers padded their numbers, which I believe they did. There are few records in any caucus state aside from Texas that show that caucusers were legal voters (and many of the Texas records are either doctored or illegible).
This use of the rules was applied wherever there were not laws to stop it, but the biggest example was Texas, with about 750,000 caucus-goers and an elaborate paper trail.
I was there as an area captain who also ran the triage desk. I had direct oversight of much of El Paso. By mid-morning, we knew independently what the HQ in Austin did, that there was a systematic effort to gather blank caucus forms, and illegally submit the names of people who did not attend the caucuses. We have a witness in the film who overheard some of the planning for this, and many witnesses who reported manipulation of the sign-in sheets. In El Paso, we have a number of affidavits from people who witnessed OFA organizers falsifying forms.
I've been a field director since the mid-'90s, and I would never have believed a Democratic campaign was capable of this if I hadn't seen the evidence. This is something I only would have expected from a Republican campaign, but this was worse than anything I've seen from dirty GOP campaigns I've seen here on the Central Coast.
Obama is a Chicago pol of the Alinsky school of political organizing in which effective action is, by definition, amoral. Any means within the law are to be used. And in a caucus, essentially everything is within the law if you have the voting majority to ratify your work or reject opposing allegations.
The Result
Obama had everything break his way, and all of the major institutions behind him: party committees, the press, and big money. He ran a tight primary campaign, even though it was ultimately ineffective at winning the majority of Democrats. In the final tally, he won by approximately 17 pledged delegates, once the DNC let FL and MI voters be represented.
If everything had not broken his way, if this story was available to the voters, I don't think he would have won.
Peniel Cronin did the only comprehensive review of the numerical role of caucuses in the Democratic primary, finding that, in the end, all of Obama's lead in pledged delegates came from caucuses that awarded more delegates to Obama than if there had been state run elections. We saw this in Texas: in the only major towns that were orderly enough to report over 50% of caucus results on election day (a low bar to be sure), the same-day primary results were essentially identical to the caucus results. Yet statewide, in utter chaos where some counties never publicly reported their results (!), Obama got a 16% boost, winning by 12.5% instead of his 3.5% popular vote loss. [last two numbers fixed]
But numbers can be sterile. Since politics is a game of momentum, or more precisely, apparent momentum, it's pretty obvious that Obama had to create the illusion of inevitability by manipulating the caucuses.
In El Paso, we had one of the most well run campaign offices of either campaign in any major caucus city, and were able to systematically stop or reverse the Obama vote theft strategy. We typically had two or three trained people at each precinct, and won over 70% of the final caucus vote. Most caucuses were orderly, if you can call an hours-long ordeal in cold weather orderly. Because of our tight organization, we were able to do something we haven't seen elsewhere: we methodically surveyed every precinct for irregularities beyond which had been reported on election day. Our script was neutral, "Are you aware of any problems at your precinct convention from either campaign?," and we found the patterns I discuss above. The only ding on our El Paso Campaign was that the county convention allocated too many at large delegates to Hillary, a procedural issue. But on election day, a full court press of vote theft was stopped dead in its tracks, something we can't say about caucuses elsewhere in Texas and other states.
We Will Not Be Silenced
I'm afraid I never properly told the back story to the documentary, as I realized in a recent email exchange with lambert.
The film came about when a former Congressional investigator contacted award winning documentarian Gigi Gaston, who had helped campaign for Hillary, producing the pro-Hillary Sophie B. Hawkins music video. Their goal was to "keep Hillary's options open," as the primaries came to an end. My purpose was similar, I wanted the story to be available in case the press started to treat Obama like a regular candidate, and to put the testimonials in the record for the day when people finally asked where this guy came from.
The investigator and Gigi contacted me after they already had quite a bit of interview footage - they found me via Google after my widely published account from El Paso. I thought we had been through hell in EL Paso, but as I came to find, we had it easy. We found endless accounts from other cities and states, most of which we didn't even get on film. I have a stack of affidavits showing falsification of documents, fabricated delegate counts, stolen PIN numbers, you name it, all of which we caught and corrected because Hillary people had the majority in Hispanic towns, but almost none of it is in the movie. I ended up using my expertise with the caucus system to help produce footage from everywhere else.
We Will Not Be Silenced is on YouTube, but we never consciously drew public attention to it. We designed it to inform DNC delegates about this otherwise untold story. We had help from top Hillary supporters to broadcast it to members of Congress and their chiefs of staff on a secure website, with a few thousand viewings, then put it on YouTube when we maxed-out our bandwidth. The best-case scenario was that the film would explain Hillary's rightful legitimacy in the case that party elders faced a Gary Hart-style crisis, and the final scenario was that it helped galvanize Hillary delegates in what became the ultimate caucus in Denver, where all manner of tricks were used to shave Hillary's delegate count.
So that's the story. The film exists on YouTube as part of the historical record, an artifact of an unprecedented Democratic Primary in which the "winner" does not have traditional legitimacy.
"Always aim high, work hard, and care deeply about what you believe in. When you stumble, keep faith. When you?re knocked down, get right back up. And NEVER listen to anyone who says you can't or shouldn't go on."
Hillary Clinton - June 7, 2008
