The REAL Issue with Michigan Delegates

It isn't about toppling Obama as the nominee; it's about toppling Iowa & New Hampshire as gateways to the presidency. I say BRAVO! They will get full votes, not 1/2 votes, because of the way their delegates will be allocated so they can target the two states that have held both parties hostage for decades.

Read the whole thing to the bottom for some interesting tidbits.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/us/politics/03web-seelye.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

June 2, 2008
On Line
Gauging Fallout From Rules Committee’s Decisions
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

There’s some follow-up news to the Democratic Party’s rules committee’s decisions over the weekend.

First of all, it seems that even though the committee voted to give the delegates from Michigan and Florida only half a vote each at the convention, they will end up getting full votes.

And secondly, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s folks are still up in arms about the allocation of delegates in Michigan and made the point in force across the Sunday shows. They haven’t decided yet whether to challenge it officially, and it may become a bargaining chip in their endgame.

But both these issues could complicate things for the party down the road.

First, on the delegates getting full voting strength. That is the prerogative of the nominee. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan says that both Senator Barack Obama and Mrs. Clinton have told him that if they were nominated they would give the delegates full voting strength.

“We’re assured we’re going to get a full vote,” Mr. Levin said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

He added: “And both candidates have said that they want Michigan’s delegation to have a full vote. She said that yesterday and Senator Obama has said that he can guarantee that the Michigan delegation will be seated and they’ll have a full voice at the convention, when he has enough delegates to know that he’s the nominee.”

This raises some interesting questions — like whether the rules matter.

If the two rogue states are fully seated at the conventions with full voting rights, what’s to discourage others from violating the national party’s calendar next time? This is what got Michigan and Florida into trouble in the first place.

The theory among committee members is that the states will stay in line because they won’t want to replicate the Michigan/Florida experience, which infuriated voters, made the states the objects of national derision and denied them all the attention and financial rewards that come with a primary. We’ll see.

But here’s another reason why restoring these delegates to full strength could prove problematic down the road. Ask yourself, why was Michigan so eager to have full delegate strength at the convention if the nominee will already have been chosen?

As Mr. Levin reminded listeners, there’s more to a convention than just nominating a candidate.

It’s about having enough votes to do other things — and if you are, say, Michigan, that includes pursuit of your long-time goal of toppling New Hampshire and Iowa from their perches of primacy in the nominating calendar.

“So this is not about Senator Clinton or about Senator Obama?” Bob Schieffer, the host of “Face the Nation,” asked Mr. Levin. “This is about New Hampshire?”

Mr. Levin: “You’re exactly right.”

Mr. Levin has been on that crusade for years. He suggested that the chaos this time around was a small price to pay if it could advance that cause. He went on to cast Michigan as an agent of “reform” of the system, which, he said, “is a really messed-up system where a few states always go first.”

So look for Michigan to be back on both feet to continue the contentious fight to knock out New Hampshire and Iowa. (It will be interesting to see how the party of a President Obama might deal with this, since he won Iowa but lost New Hampshire.)

On the second point, about the Michigan delegation: The Clinton team is outraged that the committee arbitrarily assigned 59 delegates to Mr. Obama, whose name was not on the ballot. And they are even more outraged that among those 59 were four that were “hijacked” from Mrs. Clinton, as Harold Ickes, her top lieutenant, put it. (Based on the popular vote, they say, Mrs. Clinton should have received 73 delegates but the committee gave her 69 instead.)

How could the committee simply take votes from one candidate and give them to someone else? Isn’t that, um, undemocratic?

James Roosevelt, the co-chairman of the rules committee, said on ABC’s “This Week” that the Michigan primary “was not a legal event,” because Michigan (along with Florida) violated the primary calendar.

Translation: if the elections were not legal, then the remedy does not have to be legal either.

Mr. Roosevelt made a second point. “Half the candidates, including Senator Obama, were not on the ballot,” he said. “What we had to do as the rules committee was come up with something that was the best reflection that we could find of how the voters really intended to vote, and that’s what we did.”

To determine voter intent, the committee looked at exit polling and write-in ballots. Exit polling has been notoriously flawed on many notable occasions, but this guided them in their allocation.

A third factor, offered by Obama supporters, was that the Michigan contingent — including former Gov. James Blanchard, who backed Mrs. Clinton — had come up with this plan and agreed to it.

David E. Bonior, the former Michigan Congressman who is now a top adviser to Mr. Obama, said on CNN that the deal could have been much worse for Mrs. Clinton. Originally, the Obama campaign actually had the votes on the committee for its own plan of splitting Michigan’s delegates evenly between them.

People with direct knowledge told us how this unfolded internally within the rules committee in a marathon closed-door session on Friday night.

The Clinton team went into the session with more visible support, with 13 of the 28 committee members having publicly backed Mrs. Clinton and 8 or 9 having backed Mr. Obama. The Clinton plan was for Michigan’s delegates to be allocated according to the popular vote, 55 percent for her and 40 percent for “uncommitted.” She wanted those 40 percent to remain “uncommitted” going to the convention, and not be assigned to Mr. Obama, meaning he would get no delegates.

But over the course of the five-and-a-half-hour session, the Obama team steadily gained support for its own plan of dividing the delegates evenly, and after three straw votes, it won support by one vote (14-13, with one abstention).

That was completely unacceptable to the Clinton side. But the moment starkly illustrated the new reality, that Mr. Obama now controlled the party, both in Michigan and nationally, and the clout of the Clintons had diminished.

In any case, that one-vote margin was too slim a reed to hang such a divisive plan on, so the Obama people backed off. Instead, they pushed the so-called Michigan plan, which assigned the “uncommitted” delegates to Mr. Obama and took away four from Mrs. Clinton.

Mr. Bonior, who is not on the committee, explained it this way: “We decided, in the spirit of unity, the Obama campaign, to go with what the Clinton people — for instance, the governor of Michigan who supported the final outcome — wanted, which was the solution that was reached.”

The final vote, in public on Saturday, was 19-8. In the end, five of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters deserted her.

Some worried that, down the road, this decision could set a terrible precedent for arbitrarily giving and taking votes from one candidate to another.

But the Clinton campaign’s immediate concern was that the decision dashed any last hope for finding a big chunk of delegates, effectively making it impossible for her to catch Mr. Obama’s delegate lead.

Mr. Ickes had laid down the marker that they might fight the decision through the credentials committee. On Sunday, Clinton supporters kept that option open, but it seemed a hard case to make because even though an important principle was at stake, fighting at this point would look as if they were going to the mat for just four delegates — too little, too late to alter the outcome.

The difficulty of their position seemed to enrage them further. Terry McAuliffe, Mrs. Clinton’s irrepressible cheerleader-in-chief, came close to accusing the party, of which he was once chairman, of stealing the votes.

“This is a fight for democracy,” he declared on CNN. “It is a fight for ‘every vote counts.’ I’m still incensed about what happened to Al Gore in 2000 when they stole that election, and we’ve got to make sure that people feel good about this process, especially in a state like Michigan, a must-win state for the Democrats.”

Mrs. Clinton had been invoking the 2000 debacle for weeks. Now they had an actual case about making every vote count.

But few outside the Clinton camp seemed ready to listen.