The Four Michigan Delegates Obama Now Has Didn't Belong To Clinton To Start
At the historic DNC Rules Committee of Saturday May 31, 2008, both Florida and Michigan delegates were seated but with 50 percent of the common voting power each and with Senator Clinton receiving 69 delegates and Senator Obama gaining 59 delegates. The total number is 128 delegates, so the 50 percent split mark would be 64 delegates.
The Clinton camp, lead by Senior Campaign Advisor Harold Ickes, claims that they were forced to give 4 delegates to Senator Obama. Before we take on their claim, let's give it a closer look.
The charge of Ickes and others, like Clinton campaign supporter Lanny Davis, is that Clinton should have gotten 73 delegates and "uncommitted" 55. When they didn't get their way, Ickes, claiming to speak for Senator Clinton, but really, I think got carried away, said they were going to take their fight to the DNC Convention.
They will lose the fight again if they do.
The reason is that Senator Clinton kept her name on the Michigan ballot, whereas Senator Obama, Senator Edwards, Governor Bill Richardson, and the other Democratic Presidential candidates took their name off the ballot, because they, and Senator Clinton, knew and admitted that the "Michigan primary would not count."
The remainder was the "uncommitted" vote, which, when the actual Michigan primary was held against DNC rules -- which told the state not to hold its primary ahead of the schedule orginally set for it by and with the DNC -- became an unusually large percentage of the vote, something like 30 percent of the total.
The Clinton people base their delegate estimate on that actual voting outcome, and say that the legitimacy of the Michigan process rests in the 600,000 people who voted in that state. That's the basis for the anger of some Clinton people like Ickes. And here's the major problem.
The delegates never actually belonged to the Clinton campaign, but to the DNC, because Michigan was stripped of its delegates by the DNC, which the DNC Rules Committee has the power to do, and did.
Because of that fact, the DNC Rules Committee could come up with any scenario they could and had the votes to pass, and that's what happened. The Rules Committee could have elected to do absolutely nothing and have a "zero-delegate" outcome, which means Senator Clinton would have no delegates seated from Michigan. Those delegates would be allocated by the DNC because, again, the DNC stripped Michigan of its delegates to start with.
And regarding the 600,000 voters, there's a great argument and study that suggests as many as 1 million people did not vote in Michigan because they were under the impression the primary would not count by the view of the DNC. And they were right. The DNC stripped Michigan of delegates.
Because of this, delegates were malleable by the DNC. In other words, because Michigan was stripped of delegates, the DNC could give life to and then shape and mold the delegate count and split as it chose to do so, and it did just that.
The DNC was well within its right to do what it did, and Senator Clinton in reality had no right to any number of delegates. She, like the other candidates including Senator Obama, was at the mercy of the DNC Rules Committee.
Harold Ickes knows this, and admitted on today's Meet The Press show with Tim Russert, that the reason the Clinton people and Senator Clinton said that they knew Michigan wasn't going to count. Here's what Ickes said on MTP today:
MR. ICKES: Michigan was, in fact, a real primary. Six hundred thousand people voted, Tim, compared, compared, compared to 160,000 in '04, which had a high--which had a real, live primary as well.
MR. RUSSERT: Then why did Senator Clinton say it wasn't going to count for anything?
MR. ICKES: I think at that time people were focused on Super Tuesday, and a lot of us did not feel that it was going to go beyond that.
Wow.
Think about that. I also can't believe Tim Russert didn't hammer Ickes on that statement because Harold just admitted on national television that the reason Clinton didn't concern herself with "defending Michigan" at the time was really because they didn't think they were going to need the delegates to win.
Wow.
So now that they're counting every delegate from here to Mars, suddenly challenging DNC rules and working some weird form of Jedi-mind trick on hapless political pundits , Michigan suddenly counts and the count must favor them.
That's not the way it works. Here's the bottom line: Florida and Michigan were stripped of their delegates, the DNC thus had the right to create delegates and shape and mold the delegste split, and as it turned out Senator Obama had the votes in the DNC Rules Committee -- including from Clinton supporters -- to achieve the outcome we see before us now.
End game.
