Zuzu has a great post up at Shakesville explaining the rules that govern the DNC and the behavior of the candidates in regard to Michigan, Florida, and the popular vote.
I’ve been fairly confused about all this, as rules-mongering is not one of my talents, and I appreciate Zuzu having taken the time to spell it out in so much detail. I suggest you go read.
Good stuff. Thanks for the link. I think that one of the points he makes – that election rules are separate from the candidate selection rules – is a very good one in this case. When a candidate is being elected for office, then you have to have a winner determined by the election, even if the margin is razor thin. But the Democratic Party is a private organization, and they have set up their primary process such that the electorate is not the only player in the decision if a given candidate is not an overwhelming favorite. The intent was that given a situation like the present one, where there is a virtual tie in the popular vote part of it, the fact that one candidate has a very thin margin in the popular vote doesn’t mean that the party would be bound to select that candidate. Sen. Obama is going to present the self-serving argument that the superdelegates should be so bound, but that obviously was never the actual intent as he well knows.
Therein lies the dilemma for the Democratic party. All the manipulations of whether and how to count the votes are just that – manipulations, and partisans on both sides know it. Let’s face it – the popular vote is a tie. And the Democrats have no way out without alienating part of their base.
If both candidates were from the same group (black male, white female, etc.) it wouldn’t matter. But their practice of identity politics, of basing the appeal of a given candidate on their membership in a given group, never anticipated that you’d have members of two different groups in a tie for a position. The success of their party’s campaign for the Presidency is a partial function of whether or not they can resolve this and are able to convince the group backing the failed candidate to support the eventual nominee that blocked the champion of their group.
Zuzu is a she.
Thanks for the correction. I just went back and checked. Somehow I had missed the picture and picked up on the silhouette, which struck me as male.
– Hillary Clinton, 10/11/2007, on New Hampshire Public Radio, defending her decision to put her name on the Michigan ballot, which had already raised suspicions and red flags to those paying attention.
The Michigan Democratic Party has already put forward a compromise proposal that was accepted by the Obama campaign but rejected by the Clinton campaign. Note that it is really up to the state parties to decide how to proportion their delegates – no candidate has power over that. Hell, even the DNC barely does. So Michigan’s recent proposal can be taken as a baseline, and it’s unlikely that either Clinton nor even Obama (if he wanted to strike off a gracious winner pose, say, now that he can afford to) can radically alter the Michigan Dems’ decision. And while theoretically the credentials committee can be appealed all the way to the convention in August, this is not exactly a grave threat to anyone but the political career of the candidate who tries to pull this stunt. (Jerry Brown tried to pull something like this back during the ’92 convention, I believe, and was laughed off the floor.)
Also, the credentials committee is answerable to all fifty state parties, many of whom – especially those that waited their turn and went late – have a strong interest in not seeing Michigan and Florida successfully game the system. My guess is that the two states will be stripped of their superdelegates while their delegate breakdown will be carefully handled to minimize its impact on the race.
So in disorganized conclusion, most of the hoohah over May 31st is completely overblown. Much of the hand wringing going on right now appears to be that of primary watchers who’ve grown addicted to drama and are trying to impute life and death onto something that will be fairly trivial.
EDIT: one last note. I’ve heard a lot of Clinton supporters, including the Shakesville blogger linked to here, say that the pledge that was signed was only to not campaign in the two states. This is wrong. The pledge said not to campaign or participate in the two primaries. And if anyone’s going to argue that the two mean the same thing, then you should have no problem using both words henceforth when the subject is brought up.