If you ain't cheatin', you ain't tryin'

Well, one campaign thinks so.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign intends to go after delegates whom Barack Obama has already won in the caucuses and primaries if she needs them to win the nomination.

This strategy was confirmed to me by a high-ranking Clinton official on Monday. And I am not talking about superdelegates, those 795 party big shots who are not pledged to anybody. I am talking about getting pledged delegates to switch sides.

What? Isn’t that impossible? A pledged delegate is pledged to a particular candidate and cannot switch, right?

Wrong.

Pledged delegates are not really pledged at all, not even on the first ballot. This has been an open secret in the party for years, but it has never really mattered because there has almost always been a clear victor by the time the convention convened.

But not this time. This time, one candidate may enter the convention leading by just a few pledged delegates, and those delegates may find themselves being promised the sun, moon and stars to switch sides.

“I swear it is not happening now, but as we get closer to the convention, if it is a stalemate, everybody will be going after everybody’s delegates,” a senior Clinton official told me Monday afternoon. “All the rules will be going out the window.”

Now the Clinton campaign claims this is not the case, but as a recent diary on dailykos pointed out, it's already beginning.

I’m in Vegas and last night myself and a dozen or so other Obama supporters were at the Culinary Union calling our Obama delegates. I probably made about 100 calls and about 95 said Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been calling them "all day" or at least once already.

The fact that they're calling them isn't a big deal, NV's Democratic party put out a list of delegates that doesn't include who the individual is a delegate for. However, we crossed their list, with our list of supporters and we're calling OUR delegates.

What gets me heated is, everyone who said Hillary's campaign called them also said they were encouraged to switch their support from Obama to Hillary . One man even said the person who called him "wouldn't let it go" and when he angrily told them he wasn't going to drop his support for Obama, they just hung up the phone on him.

The Clinton campaign has called me three times already since 2pm yesterday.

She doesn't care about what this would do to the democratic party or that it is extremely dishonest. She only cares about herself and winning, and someone who doesn't care how they win is an extremely dangerous person.