Clark County Democrats Implode at Convention

Seriously. A do-over?

The convention of course was doomed to fail even before it started, when the party booked a 5,000 capacity room to hold more than 7,000 delegates — and that’s not counting the alternates and observers who also showed up at Bally’s Saturday. By most estimates, attendance totaled at least 10,000. The fire marshals were not amused.

The inappropriate venue and the attendant disenfranchisement (people couldn’t participate if they couldn’t get in), confusion over delegate registration, an untrustworthy and backward balloting system (seriously, roaming cardboard boxes?), day-long piss-poor communications — the sordid list of things that went wrong and that could have and should have been done differently is far too long to inventory in a blog post.

That Hunt should resign immediately as county party chairman goes without saying. All we would add is that a restraining order should also be issued to keep him from coming within 500 yards of any decision that might have an impact on the county or state Democratic Party for as long as there are people who call themselves Democrats and a state called Nevada.

When it became obvious that Saturday’s convention was too poorly organized and was in fact such a colossal fiasco that any delegates selected would be vulnerable to challenge at the state convention, and that the credentials of Nevada’s delegation at the national convention might even be jeopardized, leaders for both the Clinton and Obama campaigns supported the motion to call it a day and try again some other time.

Yikes. By comparison, the Washoe Democrats coped very well with the increased turnout:

Washoe County convention chairman Matt Dickson, urging the credentials committee to speed things up, left the room nearly shouting: “We will not be Clark County. We will not be Clark County.”

Washoe wisely moved the convention from the Peppermill to the Reno Events Center when it realized that attendance would be more than expected.

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