Texas politics is to real politics as Texas Hold 'Em is to real poker

I spent a lot of time tonight thinking about the Unit Rule while I was standing idly by at my precinct convention. I was thinking about the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. My father was a Texas delegate to that convention and although he favored Adlai Stevenson, it didn't matter. Texas had something called the Unit Rule which dictated that the entire Texas delegation had to cast their votes for the candidate favored by the majority of the delegation. That was the year Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Baines Johnson was running so the choice of the delegation was obvious. It was made more so because Johnson practically handpicked the delegates. My dad was chosen because he was a vice president at Brown & Root and students of Texas political history know the connection between Johnson and Brown & Root.

Texas Democrats have crawled their way to a more democratic way of choosing delegates but it is still somewhat of a strange process. To really make your voice heard for president, you have to vote twice--once during the somewhat orderly election that takes place between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. and then again in the chaotic precinct convention that takes place after the polls close.

I have no idea who won my precinct in the regular election, but in the precinct convention Barak Obama took two-thirds of the vote. Because our precinct can send 8 delegates to the senatorial convention, that meant five delegates were allotted to Obama and three to Hillary Clinton. I tried my best not to be one of them -- since Robert Kennedy's assassination, I have chosen to remain an aloof observer of the political process rather than an active participant -- but in order to have a full slate of delegates, I volunteered to be an alternate.

As I write this, almost an hour after our precinct convention adjourned, I'm getting calls from friends in Houston and Austin who say their conventions haven't even started. One friend told me she got shut out of her convention in Houston because the room where the convention was held had reached capacity. Now there's democracy for you.

This silly notion that you have to vote twice in order to make sure your voice is heard is a flawed process that needs to be fixed. True, two-thirds of the delegates will be chosen according to the popular vote, but one third will be chosen through his back-room (thank heaven's people aren't allowed to smoke in public places any longer because we would really have a political cliche) procedure that, by the time it gets to the state convention level, loses all semblance of being a democratic process.

But I played their stupid game. So what does that say about me? What's more, my son joined me at the precinct convention during a break from his organic chemistry class he was taking elsewhere on this college campus where our precinct convention was being held. That was probably the real reason I was thinking back to that Unit Rule situation--it was about fathers and sons more than it was about Texas politics. My son has a 2-year-old daughter. The legacy will continue and that's the important thing.