DNC Ruling Seals Clinton, Obama Fate Against McCain

We wise guys in the political punditry class and the media have tried to bury Senator Hillary Clinton’s candidacy several times during the course of this campaign. Each time in the past, Clinton has defied the expectations of the prognosticators - her victories in New Hampshire and Ohio standing out as key examples of the resiliency of her candidacy. But Saturday’s ruling by the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee regarding the seating of the Florida and Michigan delegations to the national convention. appears, at long last, to be the final straw. It is hard to see how even Bill Clinton himself can pull this rabbit out of the Clintons’ old bag of tricks. As the primary season nears its close, it is looking more and more like Barack Obama will be the nominee of the Democratic Party.

Saturday’s decision by the DNC closes an important chapter in what has been a thorny dilemma for the national Democratic Party ever since it decided to sanction the states of Michigan and Florida for violating party rules in holding their presidential primaries before February 5. It is ironic that the very body which escalated the problem (the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee) ended up charged with the responsibility of solving it. It was the unwise decision of this committee to strip the two noncompliant states of all of their delegates (rather than taking away half of their delegates, as the party’s own bylaws provide) that unnecessarily complicated this issue. In hindsight, they would have been better served if they had copied the example of the Republicans, who reduced those states’ delegations by half for committing similar breeches to their party’s rules. After nine hours of passionate, sometimes rancorous debate (including a behind closed-doors session to work out the final details of a compromise), the Rules Committee did what it probably should have done in the beginning - strip each state of half of its voting strength at the national convention. The stickiest hurdle in reaching a compromise turned out to be the Michigan case, where all of the major Democratic candidates except Clinton withdrew their names from the ballot after the DNC voted to strip Michigan of its delegates. The committee agreed to a compromise offered by the Michigan Democratic Party awarding 69 delegates to Senator Clinton and 59 to Senator Obama.

Many of Clinton’s supporters expressed outrage with the compromise, charging that the party’s solution “disrespected” the voters of Michigan and Florida. Senator Clinton and her allies had pushed to have the full voting strength of both states restored and urged that the primary results from those contests be used to determine the allocation of delegates from those two states. Her best case scenario relied on garnering the maximum number of delegates mathematically possible out of Florida and Michigan and then making her pitch to the super delegates to put her over the top. She would then argue, based on her wins in states like Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and West Virginia, that she, not Obama, is the better general election candidate against John McCain By voting down the Clinton proposal, the DNC’s decision dashed the New York senator’s last hope to substantially cut into Barack Obama’s delegate lead before the conclusion of the Democratic primaries on June 3. . With only Puerto Rico, South Dakota, and Montana remaining, there simply are not enough pledged delegates remaining (even if Clinton were to carry all three of these contests) for her to catch Sen. Obama. At this point, Mrs. Clinton would need virtually all of the remaining undeclared super delegates to vote en masse for her in order to snatch the nomination from Mr. Obama. There is a greater probability of witnessing Linus finally meeting the Great Pumpkin at a pumpkin patch near you than the likelihood that all of the remaining super delegates will suddenly decide to permanently alienate the most loyal constituency within the Democratic Party (African Americans) by denying Barack Obama the nomination.

Listening to the increasingly strident, almost hysterical rhetoric coming from Clinton’s surrogates (and the candidate herself) in recent days has been especially painful to absorb. In recent visits to Florida, Clinton tried to compare the delegate dilemma with the disputed election in 2000 - touching what is still a raw nerve to Democrats in Florida and elsewhere. On another occasion, she tried to compare the dispute over Florida’s delegates to the rigged elections in Zimbabwe. And there was. of course, the unconscionable reference to Robert Kennedy’s assassination in a patently inept way to justify her refusal to drop out of the race. Each of these instances share a common thread: they are examples of a desperate candidate applying historically inaccurate analogies in a morally reprehensible way. Clinton proved all too often in this campaign - and especially in its last days - that the card carrying members of the “right wing conspiracy” were right about her and President Clinton in one fundamental respect - in their conviction that the Clintons will say anything or do anything in order to win an election, principles be damned.

Howls of protest from the Clinton camp decrying the “injustice” of the DNC’s decision regarding Florida and Michigan ring hollow. It was Senator Clinton herself who supported the DNC’s decision to strip both states of their delegates. She signed a pledge - along with the other Democratic contenders - not to campaign in the states cited by the national party for violating the rules. Indeed, the Rules Committee, which included a strong contingent of allies of the Clinton campaign, played an instrumental role in levying the sanctions on Florida and Michigan in the first place. But all of this occurred, of course, when the Clinton people assumed that their candidate’s path to the nomination would be a cakewalk. They could afford to punish Florida and Michigan then because they assumed that, in the end, it would not matter if those two states did not count. After February 5 (Super Tuesday), the race for the nomination would be effectively over anyway. They did not seriously contemplate the idea that a first-term senator from Illinois could have the capacity to deny the inevitable candidate from claiming the Democratic nomination.

Only when it became clear that Clinton could not overtake Senator Obama without counting the votes in Michigan and Florida did she all of a sudden become so concerned about the “disenfranchisement” of the voters in those states. The Clinton campaign blamed the lingering impasse over what to do about those two states on the Obama campaign; sometimes, the Clinton people likened the Obama folks to Katherine Harris and that gang of thieves who stole the election for George Bush in Florida. To be sure, the Obama campaign at times during this process was, to put it mildly, less than cooperative. But much of the vitriol surrounding this impasse emanated from a Clinton campaign operation trying to shift the blame from the multiple, self-inflicted blunders and contradictions that shipwrecked her candidacy. In addition to failing to plan beyond Super Tuesday, the Clinton people failed to take the caucus states seriously, allowing Barack Obama to sweep most of those states and rack up a ton of delegates in the process. Moreover, Mrs. Clinton and her husband in the course of the campaign managed to alienate African Americans - a core constituency who had traditionally formed the bedrock for the winning Clinton electoral coalitions of the past. These and other strategic errors on the part of Team Clinton left the campaign with little margin for error and thus inflated the importance of the Michigan and Florida controversies.

To be sure, Clinton surrogate Harold Ickes made a point to announce that his candidate reserved the right to appeal the Rules Committee’s decision to the party’s Credentials Committee, which meets later this summer. But that scenario is probably unlikely. After June 3, the undeclared super delegates will be relieved of their last excuse not to declare themselves. Pressure is already mounting - especially from congressional Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid for their colleagues who have not endorsed a candidate to “get off the fence.” Many party insiders (as well as rank and file Democrats) worry that the unexpected long primary battle between Clinton and Obama has put the eventual nominee at a disadvantage in the general election battle with McCain. Democrats seem ready to pivot toward November and to prepare themselves not only for the contest against John McCain, but to the congressional races down the ballot. Barack Obama will almost certainly have the required number of delegates to secure the nomination well before the Credentials Committee will meet - thus making an appeal by Clinton’s people a moot point.

If there is any analogy from the 2000 disputed election to the Michigan and Florida controversies this year, it is this: what will be interesting will be how Hillary Clinton behaves starting on June 4. Will she accept the decision of the DNC Rules Committee - which eliminates virtually any hope (slim as it was) that she could wrestle the nomination away from Barack Obama? Even if, as Al Gore said about the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, she “strongly disagrees” with the DNC’s decision, will she accept it? Or will she continue to fan the flames of disappointment and resentment among the ranks of her supporters, casting doubt on the legitimacy of the Democratic nominee? The next few days will be very interesting to watch.

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