The Democratic Party Rules and Bylaws Committee is meeting now to determine the fate of the primaries held in Florida and Michigan.

In a nutshell, I think the votes in those states should in no way be counted for a few reasons:

• Neither Clinton nor Obama campaigned in the states.
• Changing the rules after the vote is unfair to everyone who listened to the candidates and the DNC. Though votes were held and in some cases record turnout was had – Democratic voters were well aware the votes would not count. Many (TPM suggests over a million Florida Democrats stayed home with the undertanding that the vote didn’t matter) did not vote at all because of the stated rules. To recognize the votes in those states is unfair to those who were told, by Clinton, Obama and the DNC itself that the primaries would not count for anything.
• The states did this to themselves. This part will get me some flack, I know. Floridians in particular will say, “but our state legislature and Governor are Republicans and they moved the date up.” And I will respond, you picked a bad state legislature and Governor.

Here’s what the results will come down to.

• The next impact on the delegate race will be negligible because Obama’s lead is big enough to make even a full victory by Clinton meaningless. No mater how this changes the delegate race or the goal of 2,026 delegates, Obama will still be the presumptive nominee by the week’s end – he’s simply too close to the finish line and Pelosi and Reid have asked all the uncomitted super delegates to get off their asses.
• If Clinton is awarded so much as ONE DELEGATE more than Obama in either Florida or Michigan, then it means it’s reflecting the will of the flawed popular vote. In effect, it VALIDATES the popular vote and will give Clinton an unequivocal popular vote lead. And it means that news organizations and Clintonites can add the popular votes of these states to their tallies without footnotes or long-winded, cumbersome caveats. The result of this is that Team Clinton will argue that she won the popular vote and that Obama is winning on a technicality – ala George W. Bush in 2000.

Whether she wins or loses today’s fight, I’m more convinced than ever that she will fight all the way to the convention and further work to hurt Obama as a nominee.

– Steve

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.