Forget the battle over superdelegates; the Clinton campaign has decided to turn regular delegates into wild cards. Though the handful of citizens that you vote for on primary day are "pledged" to a candidate, they are not bound to vote for that candidate at the convention. "Pledged delegates are not really pledged at all, not even on the first ballot," writes Roger Simon on Politico.com. "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." A senior Clinton campaign official confirmed to him that "as we get closer to the convention, if it is a stalemate, everybody will be going after everybody’s delegates… All the rules will be going out the window." This is going to sound baaaaad to voters who went through the trouble of pulling the lever for each delegate under their chosen candidate's name, thinking that they were selecting people who would automatically help his or her cause. Also, after Hillary's well-publicized efforts to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida (where she won handily) at the convention even though they were punished by the DNC, this is going to come off as particularly underhanded. The Clinton official who says that "everybody will be going after everybody's delegates" may be correct. But the fact that we're hearing about Clinton considering it first is going to reflect poorly on her. It just sounds like she's playing dirty. This is where Barack Obama's high-school-basketball years are coming in to his advantage. As anyone who has ever played ball knows, if you're going to steal the ball by fouling an opposing player, you don't announce it to the refs before you do it.

Clinton Targets Pledged Delegates [Politico]