Democratic Campaign 2008: More on the Rules Committee’s Decisions

On the day of the Democratic rules committee decision to seat the Florida and Michigan delegates I wrote that despite the arbitrary way they dealt with especially Michigan, each candidate got something—Obama an end to the last real obstacles to his nomination and Clinton more support for the argument that she has won nearly all the big states and the swing states, and, thus is more electible in November and, for any superdelegate who may still be listening, a legitimate claim that she is ahead in the popular vote.

I want to look a little closer at Hillary Clinton’s victory, such as it is, and explain what I meant, especially with respect to including Michigan as part of the popular vote.

Leave aside the fact that only Chris Dodd’s name was on the Michigan ballot in addition to Clinton’s and that Clinton ended up with 55 percent of the votes and 40 percent went to “uncommitted.”

Disregard that in awarding 69 delegates to Clinton and 59 to Obama (Both these figures must be halved because the rules committee docked them this much as punishment for each state’s ignoring the DNC’s primary calendar),the Democratic witches and warlocks threw into the bubbling cauldron a rough approximation based on Clinton’s vote, advance polls indicating how many votes each candidate would receive, and, more than likely, the eye of a toad in order to conjure the supernatural delegate totals.

Forget that the rules committee’s treatment of Michigan makes a mockery of the notion that every vote should be counted.

Because, despite the fuzzy math and the paranormal tricks, thanks to the rules committee, Clinton can claim victory not only in these states, but legitimately count the popular vote in each, something heretofore thought pretty much inconceivable, given the fact that the DNC itself, with the agreement of both Clinton and Obama, had taken these states off the table.

In a way only Clinton can do, she is slicing and dicing this measure in extraordinary ways though to what end, as she has almost no chance of winning at this point, is unclear. As of Saturday, Clinton was saying with a face made nearly straight by the rules committee’s decisions that day that she was beating Obama in the popular vote although almost no one in the media or anywhere other than the Clinton campaign was saying this.

How did she get there? She included the votes she received in both Florida and Michigan, tossed out several of the caucuses Obama won because no official vote tallies were kept and, despite the rules committee’s awarding him nearly half the delegates in Michigan, gave zero popular votes in Michigan to Obama because, she said, he wasn’t on the ballot. All of which could be considered at once technically correct, ham-handed, duplicitous, and vintage Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s ads in Montana and South Dakota, the final primaries, in this long strange trip, tout the popular vote lead, and her advisor, Howard Ickes, was all over the news on Sunday telling Meet the Press’ Tim Russert and anyone else who would listen that Clinton was ahead in the popular vote.

Clinton’s manipulations and self-serving representations of the popular vote totals is pretty preposterous even by her standards given that she at least tacitly agreed, along with many others, with the DNC’s asinine penalty to strip Florida and Michigan of all delegates when she signed a pledge with the states of Iowa and New Hampshire not to campaign in the upstart states. However, you can’t blame her for doing this any more than you can blame Obama for essentially blackmailing the superdelegates to vote for him and not overturn the will of the people, or that is, anyway, the will of the people as represented by the number of pledged delegates even though the number separating him and Clinton could be around 100 or so when the final primaries come to an end tomorrow. Obama’s argument is given teeth that it wouldn’t otherwise have because so many of his supporters are black and the party cannot risk alienating such a stalwart and important element of its base.

The DNC, its rules committee, and leaders such as DNC Chair, Howard Dean, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, have encouraged these shenanigans. It was bad enough that they only too happily disenfranchised voters in Florida and Michigan—two states that are crucial to Democrats chances in the general election—or for Pelosi to say, as she and nearly every other Democratic leader has done, that the superdelegates should not overturn the pledged delegates, no matter how thin the margin separating the candidates. But for the DNC to come up with the hare-brained apportionment of delegates in Michigan based on partial votes and the will of the rules committee instead of Michigan primary voters has too many echoes of rigged elections and the nightmarish incompetence in Florida in the 2000 general election.

The DNC has one hell of a lot to answer for this time around but to paraphrase Keith Olbermann of MSNBC who used the phrase to excoriate Hillary Clinton for her RFK assassination comments recently, there is one thing for which we cannot forgive the DNC. We cannot forgive that after this primary election, just like Bush’s infamous victory over Gore in 2000, an awful lot of people will have reason to believe that the 2008 Democratic election process was unfair and that the nominee of the Party, whether Clinton, or as is likely the case, Obama, may be illegitimate.

It just doesn’t get any worse than this when it comes to elections and the result, as it frequently is in such situations, is likely to be as disastrous for Democrats as it was in 2000.