I've been tough on Hillary Clinton lately for speaking falsely about Barack Obama and his record on the Iraq war. (See here and here.) But I have to say this: Clinton and her allies are right about Nevada. They have been blasting the process that will be used in the January 19 caucus. Clinton has groused about caucuses in general, complaining that because caucus meetings occur at a specific time, many voters (say, those who have to be at work) miss out and are disenfranchised. All that is true--though I doubt Clinton would have adopted the role of Ms. Empowerment if Iowa and Nevada were good states for her. In Nevada, though, one step implemented in response to that criticism may end up hurting her. But whether or not it's bad for Clinton, this reform still warrants second thoughts.

In Nevada, Clinton is at a disadvantage because the major Democratic political player with street muscle--the Culinary Workers Union--endorsed Obama last week. This union has tens of thousands of members it can bus, shove, or escort to the caucuses. And the union won't have to push or guide them too far, for the state Democratic Party has arranged to hold caucuses in nine of Las Vegas's biggest unionized casinos.

On one level, you can say, isn't this great? It will be so much easier for blackjack dealers, cocktail waitresses, bellhops, cabbies and others to participate. But there is something a little creepy about a setup in which a union drives its members to a room at the workplace and then these members have to vote in public. (Remember, in a caucus, you don't go into a voting booth; you stand in a corner of a room.) Presumably union leaders will be there watching whom stands where. Certainly, the same dynamic might have been at play in some caucus sites in Iowa, but not in as an intense manner.

You can't blame the Obama campaign for accepting the support of the dominant union and deriving the benefits of a system set up by the state party. (One amusing note: many casino execs are Clinton supporters, and the pro-Obama union is using their casinos to help Obama.) And the caucusing-in-the-casino arrangement was cooked up long before CWU's endorsement of Obama in order to boost participation--not to benefit any specific candidate. Yet it's not a good deal for democracy. Not that I expect there will be union goons present enforcing the Obama endorsement. But people ought to be able to vote free of any concern--real or imagined.

This makes me sympathetic to the argument that caucuses ought to be abolished in favor of elections--but not sympathetic to the lawsuit filed by the Nevada State Education Association, which has gone to court to shut down the casino caucuses. (The group has not endorsed Clinton but several of its leaders support her.) It's hard not to suspect that politics, rather than principle, propelled that union to try to thwart what could be a big day for Obama.

It's no surprise that politics in Las Vegas has become a whirl of wheeling and dealing. The Clintonites are entitled to be pissed off about the casino caucuses, but that does not place them on the moral high ground. Such real estate is quite difficult to find in Sin City.