Speaking of Texas, Hillary just realized something important...

...and the fact that she did not know it before now shows that she is not ready to handle much of anything on "day one" or any other day.

Thanks to Eric Kleefield at TPM Election Central for making me aware of this story. Here's the story in a nutshell: the Hillary campaign just recently discovered that the selection of approximately one third (according to the Washington Post) of delegates in Texas is done through local caucuses held on election night after the polls close. What that means is that any win for Hillary in the primary might not yield as many delegates as the Hillary campaign first thought.

These people are either amazingly stupid, frighteningly lazy, or just too arrogant to think they have to know the rules--or all of the above.

I am not anywhere close to being an active player in party politics, and even I knew that A) local caucuses are held on election night, B) those caucuses have a role in selecting some of the delegates, and C) delegates to the National Convention are finalized at the State Convention. I knew these things even before I tried to read the official Texas Democratic Party Delegate Selection Plan, which was published in August 2007. When I tried reading through those rules last week, I quickly got a case of tired head, but even a cursory review of the rules would plainly show anyone that not all of the delegates would be apportioned according to the primary vote. An even plainer explanation appears in a brochure about the process:

Texas will hold a presidential primary on Tuesday, March 4, 2008. The Primary will be open to any registered Texas voter who does not vote in another party’s primary and who does not attend another party’s political convention.

A total of 126 delegate positions (three-quarters of the base delegation) will be distributed to presidential candidates based on the results of the primary. Forty-two delegate positions (one-quarter of the base delegation) will be distributed based on the number of people attending the party’s conventions. The delegates themselves will be elected at our State Convention June 6-7, 2008, in Austin.

[NOTE: I believe that the "base delegation" does not include superdelegates.] And despite the facts that 1) this explanation existed 2) back in August 2007, the Hillary campaign just now figured this out.

I am going to reiterate something I said in Yet another way Hillary is like Bush: loyalty trumps competence and judgment, but with a few changes. Knowing how a state selects its delegates is nowhere near as difficult or important as the issues that a President must face every day. And yet, knowing how a state selects its delegates is rather crucial to a campaign for the Presidency. If Hillary puts together a campaign that can't or doesn't bother to find out such information that is crucial to the campaign and yet nowhere near as important as issues a President faces in office, how can anyone think she can make a good President?

Let me put this matter another way. If Hillary's "35 years of experience" cannot enable her to put together a campaign that knows such basic campaign matters, those "35 years" damn sure are not going to help her as President.