Jun 01 2008
Why Play By the Rules? The DNC Will Simply Change Them Later
In a convoluted move that made no sense whatsoever, the Democratic National Committee rules committee voted yesterday to increase the number of delegates needed to win the nomination, gave Michigan and Florida delegates a half vote and awarded a seemingly arbitrary number of Michigan delegates to Obama.
DNC Chairman Howard Dean said the move won’t please everyone, but what he really meant is that it won’t please anyone.
I suppose it you take out the decision to randomly increase the number of delegates needed to secure the nomination, the DNC sort of worked out a compromise. But it’s a compromise that makes no sense to anyone and that all sides can call unfair.
Let’s look at the half votes issue first. This is an attempt by the DNC to avoid getting slammed by people who say Michigan and Florida deserve representation.
The fact of the matter is that the average voter in Michigan and Florida had no say in when the primary was held and they do deserve to have their voted heard. Saying that they are half as important as people who followed the rules sounds way too much like disenfranchisement based on geography.
In a lot of ways, this is the least credible thing the DNC could choose to do. It’s like admitting that they think the votes should count, but being afraid to admit they screwed up the entire process by issuing a threat before the primaries took place and refusing to follow through on it. If the DNC had just strongly advised the states not to hold their primaries early, and both candidates had campaigned there, it would have been one thing. But the rules committee made a rule, heard a lot of complaints about it and then changed it mid-stream. And, there is great speculation that it could get changed again before the convention.
So the next time you attend a baseball game and your team doesn’t win, feel free to protest to the umpire who was enforcing the rules. Imagine for instance a rain delay ruling. Both teams agree that the rain has made the field too soggy to play on and opt for a contest in another place. Team Barack goes home, thinking the contest will be decided elsewhere. Team Hillary stays and plays by herself. Then the fans declare victory and get upset when the victory doesn’t count in league standings. The fans protest and the league suddenly decides to give the teams half credit for a game play with two different sets of rules and one that didn’t play the game!
A do over, while expensive, was the only right thing to do. But the committee got wishy-washy and tried to appease everyone. The simple truth is either Florida and Michigan count or they don’t. They can’t half count.
Then, there is the delegate counts in each state. Let’s recap from yesterday: Clinton won 50 percent of the vote in Florida and Obama got 33 percent. That means she gets 105 of the states 210 delegates and he gets about 70. The remaining 35 go into the convention as undecided or supporting a candidate like John Edwards who has already withdrawn from the race.The committee got it right there, mostly, except for the half vote thing. Hillary gets 105 half delegates and Barack gets 67 half delegates.
Then they got to Michigan. Barack withdrew from that race in deference to the rules, so his name wasn’t on the ballot. I argued yesterday that he should be given the undecided voters which would have given him 62 delegates and Hillary would have gotten the 86 that she won. But the committee decided Michigan would get 128 delegates (the others are so-called super-delegates and chose for themselves who to support).
One proposal called for the Michigan delegates to be split evenly between the delegates, with each getting 64 half delegates. The Clinton campaign rightly called this outrageous since she won more than 50 percent of the vote. The compromise and final decision of the committee was to take 5 delegates from Obama and give them to Clinton, so that she get 69 half delegates and he gets 59.
How this an be considered a compromise, I am not certain. It punishes Hillary for winning, Barack for not being on the ballot, and Michigan Democrats for voting in the first place. Giving Barack the uncommitted Michigan delegates would have been fair, but this seems arbitrary and contradictory to everything the party is supposed to stand for.
The Clinton campaign has discussed an appeal and may do so. In her defense, the committee decisions seem arbitrary and ill-informed. She can’t win the nomination at this point anyway, so why not give the devil his due and let the delegates vote?
I know the DNC is afraid that Hillary will sneak in and use some underhanded tactic to take the nomination away from Obama, but their idiotic tampering with the rules over and over just lends credence to the idea that the DNC is incompetent. Perhaps if the lady and her campaign were treated with a little bit of dignity, she would bow out gracefully.
Instead, she insists that if you actually count the votes cast for her and he ones cast for Barack that she won the popular vote among Demorats. The result is that more and more voters lose faith in the American electoral system. Can you really blame them?
