Insider prediction: FL delegates to get half votes

Gary Shay, a DNC rules and bylaws committee member from California, told Democrats in his state he is confident Florida's delegate mess will be resolved when the committee meets May 31, though Michigan remains murkier:

"What I anticipate will happen is that—and I have not received any communications from anybody, this is just my own thoughts on the matter—that the superdelegates will likely be seated from both states. That Florida will be seated with a half delegate for each pledged delegate based upon the January results. The concept there being that there must be some punishment for violating the rules, and at the same time, excluding those two states is very difficult, and as far as Michigan is concerned, that’s anybody’s guess. I have no idea what is going to happen with them."

Meanwhile, Thomas Edsall explores whether the Clinton campaign regards that rules and bylaws committee as its "nuclear option."

Comments

Here's a thought...

Count Florida’s votes as votes, split Florida’s Delegates 50/50, discount Michigan’s inequitable Primary completely, split Michigan’s Delegates 50/50, fire Howeird Dunce, kick the Republican consultant (Thurmadrunk) to the curb as well, and vote every incumbent out of office at you first available chance.

Problem Solved!

[rick]

Why should we be punished for the disagreements between the DNC and our elected officials who obviously don't mind nullifying our votes. This squabble is between to beaurocratic entities and the citizens are innocent. The Dems will pay in November. At least McCain is somewhat of a centrist.

[John]

I have no problem with them seating the delegates, but there is NO WAY they should do anything other than split them right down the middle for each candidate. The rules said no votes counted, so you can't give more votes to Hillary just because she won more in the primaries! Obama didn't even campaign!

Oh goody! We get to count as half people for offending the DNC's all important preference that Iowa and New Hampshire matter most. How dare us use our own state laws to set the date for a publicly financed and operated public election. Who are we to flout the DNC's wisdom that Iowa and New Hampshire should count more than us.

Clearly. we deserve to be "punished" by having our votes halved. Clearly, we are the voters who deserve to have candidates and party officials decide whether or not we count.

Who are we to just expect that our votes would be counted and counted whole. Clearly, we are just too unsophisticated and reckless to be counted as full people.

[Bill]

Goofy idea. 1/2 delegates? And just WHO does the DNC think they are dictating to the states. They're a political organization, Florida voters are NOT beholden to any organization to tell them when or if they can vote or if their votes will count as full or half or 1/8 vote! Wait, my bad..this IS the DNC and they DO tell people how to do this. If they're going to make the delegates count, then it BETTER be a 50/50 split. Sen. Obama kept to a pledge not to campaign here, wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan in keeping with the DNC rules and now the DNC is pulling this stunt. Obama supporters ought to see right through this charade and remember this come November when they've given Sen. Obama the short end of a very raw deal. Either a 50/50 split or none at all.

John:

How is it reasonable to "seat" delegates based on an equal division or any other division arrived at by party officials and/or candidates? Elections are supposed to be about the voters choosing the candidates rather than candidates and party insiders choosing which voters can be allowed to count.

Don't you think counting votes should involve....well, something the voters did or do? You'd have a point if the party didn't pretend to be democratic.

By your reasoning, the whole process could just be determined by party officials and the candidates without resorting to the boring necessity to consult the voters and listen to what they said.

You've reduced the democratic process to no more than picking a winner---the winner you want no doubt.

You really ought to believe in democracy as more than just some facade for the "real decision-making" that takes place in back rooms.

I can't tell you how proud of you I am that you "have no problem" with the seating of delegates from Florida.

By the way--speaking of rules: Legislatures are the only power in America that are empowered to set primary dates. The DNC and RNC have arrogated a power to themselves without any legal basis and are using disenfranchisement to impose their will over that of freely elected representatives of the people who are vested with legal authority.

Who is at variance with "rules" here?

Count Florida’s votes as votes, split Florida’s Delegates 50/50, discount Michigan’s inequitable Primary completely, split Michigan’s Delegates 50/50, fire Howeird Dunce, kick the Republican consultant (Thurmadrunk) to the curb as well, and vote every incumbent out of office at you first available chance.

Problem Solved!

Obama is going to be the nominee and it will be a Republican repeat of 84. That map is going to be so red we're going to look like Russia

[liberals deal in fairy tales and mental illness and conservative deal in reality of the day.]

What Conservatives Want
By William Tucker
Published 5/5/2008 12:08:22 AM
My son has become a Marxist. I'm not that concerned about it. I was one at that age, too.

He's in college in Chicago and got hooked up with a group called the Midwest Workers' Association, a division of the National Labor Federation. It's one of those community-organizing groups that canvases door-to-door. It's actually pretty good. They go out on the South Side of Chicago trying to get people to join food cooperatives and sign on to a health insurance program they've created. It's very constructive. I thought it would be a great opportunity to get off campus and meet people in the real world.

But then his political interests started taking a turn for the worse. In true Marxist fashion, he decided it didn't make sense anymore to help poor people improve their lives. It would actually be better if their lives got worse because then they would be better prepared to rise up and overthrow the system, etc. etc. So he quit.

Where to begin? I suggested maybe he read a little Dostoevsky. I told him I thought that any movement, no matter what its beliefs, starts going off in the wrong direction when it decides that ideas and ideals are more important than real people. I told him about a column I always remember as particularly gruesome -- Anna Quindlen's take on Kimberly Bergalis, the 22-year-old woman in Florida who was dying of AIDS after being infected by her dentist, who knew he had the disease but didn't tell anyone.

Quindlen announced that in order to protect the rights of doctors with AIDS, we might have to "ask some parents to put their children at some risk, however small, for the sake of principle and fairness." I remember thinking, "This is where totalitarianism begins, when we decide that principles are more important than other people's lives."

As I wrestled with all this, I tried to formulate in my mind why it is that I prefer conservatives to liberals. I finally hit upon it. Conservatives don't make as many demands on the world. They are more attuned to the idea of working with the way things are rather than despairing that they don't conform to some ideal. Of course there are conservatives who adopt this simple-minded approach as well: Government is always bad. Everything that goes wrong is the result of too much government. If the government would just leave us alone, we'd be living in a perfect world.

I don't believe government is the cause of all the world's problems, I believe the world is the cause of the world's problems. It's an imperfect place. There are things that have been wrong, things that are wrong now, and things that are probably always going to be wrong. Some will get more than others. People don't always get what they deserve. If you don't like things, work to change it. But don't sit around blaming all this on other people -- "the rich," "the politicians," or whoever happens to be the evil genius of the day.

DAVID MAMET SUMMED all this up beautifully in his recent Village Voice confession, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'" Mamet describes his epiphany as follows:

I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other -- the world in which I actually functioned day to day -- was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

This is really marvelous. I've read Thomas Sowell for 20 years and consider Knowledge and Decisions to be the basis of my understanding of the world, yet it never occurred to me that Sowell is our greatest living philosopher. Yet indeed he is, although I would never dare say so myself.

"You mean Paul Krugman isn't our greatest living philosopher," declared Dan Henninger in the Wall Street Journal after reading Mamet's piece. There's another bull's eye.

Krugman is practically having a nervous breakdown in public these days obsessing that "income inequality in America today is the greatest that it's been since the 1920s." He gets all this from two French economists, Thomas Picketty and Emmanuel Saez, who -- apparently without even setting foot in this country -- have decided that America now resembles the days leading up to the French Revolution.

Picketty and Saez took data from personal tax filings and came up with the astounding figure that the bottom 80 percent of Americans are now living on only $25,000 a year. (To see what's wrong with that, think of what happens when your own teenager files a tax return for his or her summer job.) Meanwhile, according to Picketty, Saez and Krugman, the bad guys -- the "superrich" -- have scarfed up all the nation's economic gains since 1980.

How could a pair of intelligent economists spend even two weeks in this country and believe that was true? (Saez is still in Paris while Picketty has landed in Berkeley, which perhaps explains everything.)

One of the biggest controversies going on all over the country right now is the practice of knocking down older suburban houses from before 1970 and putting up "mini-mansions" in their place. You drive past these structures and say to yourself, "Can that possibly be a single-family home?" They're the size of resort hotels.

WHO IS PUTTING up all these houses? Is it the top .01 percent -- the "superrich" that so fever Krugman's imagination?

Or is it just possible that prosperity in this country is far more widely distributed than Picketty and Saez have been able to discern from picking over tax filings? (To see where the two French economists went wrong, read any of Alan Reynolds' many writings, including this study, or his book, Income and Wealth.)

There is inequality in this country. The main inequality is between people who have a college education and those who do not, people who have stable families and those who do not, people who go to work and earn a living and those who do not.

But of course none of this impresses Krugman. For him the problem is the whole system. "Americans, understandably, have lost confidence in the prospects for a return to real prosperity. They have also, I'd suggest, lost confidence in the integrity of our economic institutions.....[T]he subprime crisis...has resurrected the sense that something is rotten in the state of our economy."

To liberals there are never any manageable problems. Instead it is always a new dawn. We have just spent a whole century discovering that when "people lose confidence in the integrity of economic institutions," what they put in its place is likely to be something far worse.

I'm not surprised that my 22-year-old son hasn't yet learned this lesson. I'm astonished that it is still a mystery to the likes of Krugman as well.

[McLuhan]

Couldn't agree more with John's(1:32PM) post. As I've have posted before, doing anything other than splitting them down the middle is not just changing the rules of the game, it's changing them after the game has been played! Based on the rules the DNC laid out the vote here cannot affect the overall outcome of the Dem's nominating process. Dean should make the decision and be done with it. This has already provided a significant obstacle to the Dem's possibility for success in Florida this fall, and it only gets more so with each passing day of irresolution.

[Buzz Killed by 5:50PM]

Wow! 5:50PM that was some rant(vent?), and I respect your right to share, but how in the world does it even remotely relate to the topic of this thread?

[Susan]

It makes sense to cut the delegation in half, since that's what the party rules called for originally, but they should take that half out of the superdelegates instead of the elected delegates...in particular, those superdelegates who were among the officials who launched the idiotic idea of jumping the primary schedule in the first place.

[John 2]

I voted for Clinton in the FL primary and thought that my vote would count!!
But at this point it is Most Important to realize that we need to vote for either Clinton or Obama in the Presidential election in November.
This is a tight Democratic race. Do not give the election to the Republicans.