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February 17, 2008

Dems Florida/Michigan Conundrum. The Fix.

Watching Senators Durbin and Schumer stand in as surrogates for the Clinton and Obama campaigns on Meet The Press this morning, it occured to me that there's really only one pragmatic solution to the Florida/Michigan conundrum.

It doesn't matter whether Clinton and Obama go into the convention tied, nearly so or not. Whomever the nominee is, Florida and Michigan are going to be hugely important to winning the general election and for strictly pragmatic reasons will need to be seated at the convention. It's too late for either state to do a make-up primary or caucus, which clearly would be preferable. The uncompetetive primaries each held clearly can't be represented. So there is only one solution that I can see...

Wipe the slate clean. Each state needs to send a delegation at 50% of their original allotment, which preserves the spirit of the DNC penalty. The respective delegations should be evenly split between Obama and Clinton supporters, thus giving neither candidate an advantage, and let those delegates decide the matter for themselves at the convention. Then let them cast their votes accordingly.

In hindsight it seems to me that the DNC penalty against Florida and Michigan for not complying with party rules was... unpragmatic and potentially counter-productive. A percentage penalty such as I've suggestion here probably would have been a much wiser course of action. Had Howard Dean parred back the delegate strength severely, say to something which would place them as the 49th and 50th smallest delegations to the convention, that would have served the same basic penalty function because it would have negated the clout of each state without disenfranchizing it's citizens, the vast majority of whom didn't have any say in when the primary was scheduled in the first place.

Posted by Kevin at February 17, 2008 09:21 AM