What Happened with the At-Large Nominations at the Texas Democratic Convention?

There was a huge brouhaha over the At-Large delegate nominations at the Texas Democratic Convention. It all started when Rep. Terri Hodge came up to the microphone and made an allegation that there was some kind of meeting going on behind closed doors. At the time, that was unrelated to the business that was going on, and the At-Large Nominations Committee had not yet released their report.

After a while, late in the evening on Saturday night, the At-Large Nominations Committee was apparently ready to issue their report, but there was some kind of serious split within the Committee. From the best information that could be gleaned at the convention, some members walked out of the room over the racial makeup of the At-Large delegates. Two opposing camps quickly started pleading their cases, and both sides had radically different stories about what happened.

The majority of the Committee stated that they had tried their best to sort out all the competing interests and had deliberated for 13 hours to try to figure out who would be an At-Large delegate. They said that they had made the fairest choices that they could make, and they had considered all of the competing interests in making difficult choices. Only about 1 in 100 of the people who applied were chosen (excuse me if I don't have the precise numbers, this is an estimation, but I think it is pretty close), so a lot of people had to be rejected.

The minority stated that they had walked out after a list was handed to the Committee containing names that were pre-determined to be chosen. They indicated that the At-Large delegates were taken from this list, and seemed to be very indignant about what had happened. They appeared to insinuate (if not directly state) that African-American delegates were deliberately excluded.

From my perspective, it was almost impossible to determine what happened from the facts that were given at the convention. There were two sides with completely divergent stories about what happened, and many people on both sides seemed to be very passionate about their version of the story.

I ended up voting with the majority, but was not completely comfortable with that. First of all, more facts seemed to be coming out during the vote from people who were there that there was indeed some sort of exclusion going on. My rationale for voting the way I did was for several reasons. First of all, if the Committee had deliberated for thirteen hours, what would take its place if we voted the selections down? After all, it was a straight up-or-down vote, so something would have to start all over again. And at the time of the vote we didn't have correct information about what would occur if it was voted down. The last information we had was that the Committee would have to re-deliberate, but after the vote was taken, new information came out stating that the Clinton and Obama campaigns would choose who would go.

Second of all, I thought that some people would be excluded no matter what, and some of them might have hurt feelings. The minority inclusion goals were only goals, from the information that was given out, and the rules seemed to be observed. There was minority representation among both sets of delegates, including GLBT, African-American, Hispanic and Asian-Americans.