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According to Newsweek, "it's only fair to conclude" that the Obama campaign is not trying to flip Texas county convention delegates.

By Ann Althouse

Newsweek blogger Andrew Romano looks into the evidence I brought up in this post yesterday ? that my son (who is a Clinton delegate) and the 2 Clinton delegates he happens to know about, were sent a mailing by the Obama campaign urging them to vote for Obama at the county convention. Romano writes:

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.

This better be good! MSM does "some digging" and gets kinda close to "the bottom" of it. I was just blogging the facts that I knew, by the way. It was Romano who wrote: "Apparently, Obama has mailed these postcards to all Texas county delegates, not just his own." (Boldface added here and below.) Now, Romano has this:

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.

So you got a copy of a spreadsheet from the Obama campaign, and according to that, my son and those 2 other persons ? just those 3! ? are incorrectly coded. What are the odds?!

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).

So Nieto is just guessing.

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.

How did we get from Nieto guessing to clarity? This is really the closest "anyone" can get to the bottom of things?

***

Relevant cautionary tale: "Los Angeles Times to Examine Its Report on Attack on Rapper."

Full post as published by Althouse on March 28, 2008 (boomark / email).