From staff reports

About a thousand supporters of Democratic presidential contenders Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton stormed the Waco Convention Center on Saturday for their county convention, overwhelming volunteers trying to sign them in and delaying the start of business nearly two hours.

Party veterans said the convention was the largest they had seen in McLennan County.

Most delegates interviewed by the Tribune-Herald acknowledged they didn’t have much to compare it with because it was their first convention. All said they were participating because of the national excitement surrounding Obama and Clinton.

“I don’t think there was ever the right candidate before,” said 64-year-old “yellow-dog Democrat” Jacque Denney, one of the few Obama delegates from West, where Clinton is most popular. “Plus the last eight years have left me so angry I felt I just had to do something.”

Sara Oliver, 65, of Waco, who volunteered to register delegates and alternates, said she, too, understood the excitement.

“This is my first time,” she said late Saturday afternoon, “and if I’d known it was going to be like this, I would have run.”

At one point, 79-year-old Jim Tom Speer, who has been attending Democratic county conventions since 1948, tried to get party officials to help prevent a “riot” in the corridor outside the McLennan Room because of the crunch of frustrated delegates, alternates and others trying to sign in.

However, he quickly added of the crowd, “I’m proud of it, and I don’t want to lose a single one of them.”

Long lines marked many of the nearly 280 county and Senate district conventions Democrats held across Texas on Saturday as they tried sorting out whether Obama or Clinton will come away with more national delegates. Early statewide results tallied by the Associated Press showed Clinton had 58 percent to Obama’s 42 percent by mid-afternoon.

The Obama campaign’s success at getting supporters to participate at the grass-roots level was evident again locally, with the candidate snaring 58 percent of the 81 delegates bound for the June state convention, the next step in Texas Democrats’ confounding delegate-selection process.

Forty-seven Obama delegates and 34 Clinton delegates will represent McLennan County at the state convention.

Because so much acrimony has marked the two Democratic presidential campaigns nationwide, some local Democrats said they feared sparks would fly when delegates gathered Saturday. However, most praised the balanced way the convention was run.

“We had hundreds of people,” said 21-year-old Baylor University student Stephanie Formas, who served on the convention credentials committee and spent much of the day trying to address delegate confusion, clerical errors and math problems. “I’m sure we had about 100 or 200 problems.

“But this is apparently the largest of these we’ve had here,” she said, “so we weren’t really sure what to expect.”

One of the low points: Two Obama supporters in paired precincts got into an argument during a vote over who would go to the state convention. One made her lack of faith in the other known and then reportedly threatened to support Clinton before yet another delegate began searching for someone to resolve the problem.

McLennan County Party chairman John Cullar had to leave the podium, mediate the spat and hastily conduct the precinct vote.

Beyond that, the air at the county convention was festive and collegial with some good-natured ribbing of one another as the event dragged on. Mary Waller, 80, of Waco, joked that one reason she and other Clinton supporters were given signs without sharpened stakes to brace them was because “they don’t want us to have any weapons.”

Of the nine local challenges stemming from the sometimes chaotic March 4 caucusing — quietly resolved two days before Saturday’s convention by the credentials committee — one involved a person who caucused but didn’t vote in the Democratic primary. Another concerned a voter who caucused at the wrong location.

By late afternoon, with the bulk of party business done, most delegates had left the hall, even though the chairman promised more on the agenda. Some said they wanted to watch the NCAA Tournament on TV. Others said they had gone without food long enough.

Terry McAuliffe, who as national chairman of Clinton’s presidential campaign was rallying Clinton supporters at the local county convention, said any bad feelings would subside once a nominee is settled on.

“In the end, we’re all going to be together,” he told a group of Clinton supporters from Waco’s Alva Vista precinct. “Till then, we’ll have a good, healthy discussion.”