Politico's Roger Simon Defends Story On Hillary And Pledged Delegates
February 19, 2008 -- 3:25 PM EST // //

The most-debated story of the day in political circles is this one in The Politico by Roger Simon reporting that the Hillary campaign is plotting to flip Obama's pledged delegates to her side.

The story was prominently featured on Mark Halperin's The Page and on Drudge this morning, and Hillary has already taken hits in the liberal blogosphere here and here.

The Hillary campaign is adamantly denying the story. But in several emails to me, Simon defended his reporting.

On the face of it, the story's sourcing looks pretty thin. Here's how it opens:

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.

This is unequivocal: The Hillary campaign has settled on this as a "strategy," a high-ranking Clinton official confirms, according to Simon. But here are the only two direct quotes from any Clinton official in the story:

“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.”

...and...

If, however, after the April 22 Pennsylvania primary the pledged delegate count looks very close, the Clinton official said, “[both] sides will start working all delegates.”

This seems quite a bit less definitive than the story's lede. Here you have a single anonymous Hillary adviser predicting that if this results in a stalemate, both sides will chase each other's delegates -- not that a particular strategy has been settled on by the Hillary camp.

I asked Simon if the official had said anything other than these quotes to indicate that a "strategy" had been settled upon, as his lede reported as fact. Simon declined to say, but pointed to this graf in the story, the suggestion being that Camp Hillary had been offered a chance to deny the story but didn't:

Clinton spokesman Phil Singer told me Monday he assumes the Obama campaign is going after delegates pledged to Clinton, though a senior Obama aide told me he knew of no such strategy.

The problem, of course, is that from this text we don't know what Singer was asked. So I asked Simon whether he had given Singer a chance to directly deny the story's central allegation. He replied: "Yes, absolutely. It was very direct."

So, presuming this is true, here's where we are. We know that an anonymous Clinton adviser predicted that if this results in a stalemate, both sides would fight for each other's pledged dels. Simon took that to mean that the Clinton camp had evolved a "strategy" to do this, and took some form of this notion to Singer, who didn't deny it, and instead tried to turn it back on Obama.

So yes, this stuff was worth sharing with readers in some form. But it seems clear that more reporting would have cleared up key questions, such as how seriously this idea was taken by the Hillary campaign or at what levels it was discussed.

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