Could the Republicans Pick the Democratic Nominee? -- The Untold Story of How the GOP Rigged Florida and Michigan

Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean came out of hiding last week to announce that there is no reason to rush to resolve the fate of Florida and Michigan. He said he was confident that these delegations, disqualified in 2007 by Dean's own Rules Committee, would be seated at the August convention -- but, apparently, only after a nominee is chosen, which he predicted would occur by July 1. This modern-day Metternich, whose two-fisted handling of this two-state controversy has already had more impact on the 2008 race than his candidacy did on the race in 2004, is promising to mediate the dispute once it's already settled.

The Dean plan is that these two swing states -- big enough to decide the nomination or general election -- will eventually be granted "virtual" seats at the convention because, as Dean imaginatively put it in an AP interview, "the campaigns believe that kind of deal is premature right now." Since one campaign (Hillary Clinton's) was amenable to redoes, even financing Michigan's, and the other campaign (Barack Obama's) opposed every feasible proposition, it is, in a strange way, true that the two sides weren't collectively ready for a deal.

In all the buzz about the media's pro-Obama tilt, its indifference to his resistance to including these states in the "actual" nominating process is its most disturbing favor, especially since this brand of "conventional politics," as Obama would put it, flies in the face of his contention that "the people" should pick the nominee. Obama's only proposal so far has been to split the delegates evenly, just like he and Michelle parcel out Christmas presents to their two daughters.

Of course, the column inches and moments of air time spent on how and why these two states and their 366 delegates have been banished adds up to less than the attention devoted to, say, the Wyoming caucus, where a 2,066-vote Obama margin gave him a big enough delegate boost to virtually cancel out Hillary Clinton's 329,000-vote margin in the five March races.

The body count that the mainstream media has regurgitated out of Florida and Michigan is that 2.3 million Democrats voted in primaries that broke the rules, leaving the DNC with no choice but to level both villages, even if the collateral damage might include the party's prospects of carrying those disenfranchised states in November. The DNC and the MSM appear to have simultaneously concluded that even Clinton's 300,000-vote win in Florida, where both candidates competed on a level playing field, shouldn't be counted in the popular vote tally, a calculation that appears nowhere in DNC rules and turns 1.7 million Democratic voters into ghosts.

The irony is that the drumbeat for Clinton's withdrawal -- coming on the heels of her recent wins and right before what may be her biggest in Pennsylvania -- is rooted in the collapse of the effort to redo Michigan and Florida. The theory is that she should quit because there is no way she can win, and that there is no way she can win because two states she could win, at least one of which she actually did win, will not be counted until she gets out. Barack Obama would thus become the nominee -- not because of an honestly earned if precariously narrow lead in the final national vote, but because of two elections he would not let happen.

If that sounds like a curious way to end a nominating contest that 30 million to 33 million voters will participate in before it's done, even stranger is that the DNC is following only some of its rules -- and that the real culprits who caused this debacle are Republicans, who are now relishing the catfight they provoked.

Dems Take the Hit for the GOP

The Republican role is not some irrelevant anecdote. The DNC is charged, under its rules, to determine whether the Democrats in a noncompliant state made a "good faith" effort to abide by the party's electoral calendar, and to impose the full weight of its available penalties, namely a 100 percent takedown of a state's delegation, only if Democratic leaders in that state misbehaved. So the fact that it was Republicans who fomented the move-up of primaries in both these states to dates out-of-line with the DNC calendar is at the heart of the matter.

The rules also demand that the DNC's 30-member Rules and Bylaws Committee conduct "an investigation, including hearings if necessary" into these matters. The purpose of such a probe is to figure out if Democratic leaders in a state that did move up "took all provable, positive steps and acted in good faith" to either "achieve legislative changes" to bring a state into compliance or to "prevent legislative changes" that took a state out of compliance. A DNC spokesman could not point to any real "investigation" the party conducted of the actions of "relevant Democratic party leaders or elected officials," as the rules put it. All that happened with Florida, for example, was that two representatives of the state party made a pitch for leniency immediately before the Rules Committee voted for sanctions.

What a probe might have discovered was a rationale for doing, at worst, what the RNC did to its own overeager primary schedulers in the same two states -- cutting the delegations by half. That's precisely the penalty specified in DNC rules, but the committee, exercising powers it certainly had the legal discretion to exercise, upped the ante as far as it could. In a bizarre reversal of public policy, the RNC, surely aware that the principal miscreants in both states were Republicans, applied a sane yet severe sanction. The Democrats opted for decapitation.

The presumption of much of the national coverage about Michigan, to start with, has been that the Dems did this one to themselves -- a presumption based, in large part, on Democratic governor Jennifer Granholm's endorsement of a January 15 vote, a date far ahead of the anticipated February 9 primary. All Clinton-backer Granholm did, however, was a sign a bill. The bill originated in a Republican-controlled Senate and passed by a 21-to-17 straight party-line vote -- with every Democrat casting a no vote.

Florida's Republican governor, Charlie Crist, is, like Granholm, seen as a prime player behind the state's acceleration of the primary calendar. But Crist isn't half the Florida story; Marco Rubio, a Jeb Bush protégé who runs the nearly 2-to-1 Republican Florida House, drove that bill through the legislature like it was a tax cut limited by law to top GOP donors.

Indeed, the tracks under this train wreck trace back, in each case, to Republican maneuvers in state legislatures, political no- man's-lands for all who've blithely dismissed the disenfranchisement of the millions of registered Florida and Michigan Democrats.

Michigan: Republicans on the Bench and in the Statehouse

Let's start with Michigan, whose Democratic chair Mark Brewer is a member of the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the national party and in that capacity voted to sanction Florida -- a pretty good indication that he wasn't a great champion of challenging the DNC calendar in his own state. Brewer in fact declared the Republican-sponsored move-up bill unacceptable from the start.

When it weaved its way through the divided Michigan legislature last August, only 29 of the state's 75 Democratic legislators (in the House and Senate) supported it. A week after the bill cleared the Senate over unified Democratic objections, these 29 Democrats in the House voted for it, precisely the same number that voted against it or abstained (22 and seven). It was 38 Republican yes votes in the House that made it law. While Democrats like the governor, U.S. Senator Carl Levin, and DNC committeewoman Debbie Dingell favored moving the primary date up, it was a Republican state senator, Cameron Brown, who proposed the January 15 date. Levin and Dingell only supported that date when they concluded that the DNC was allowing other states, like New Hampshire, to defy the party's prescribed schedule while threatening Michigan with sanctions if it shifted its date.

And Levin and Dingell certainly weren't calling the shots for the Democrats in the legislature. Andy Dillon, the Democratic House speaker who'd voted for the move-up initially, walked away from the early primary in November, almost a month before the DNC voted to strip the state of its delegation. When two court rulings found the move-up bill unconstitutional for technical reasons, giving Democratic state legislators who initially voted for it a chance to reconsider, they took it. Dillon and his House Democrats refused to support a bill that would've protected the January 15 date from threatened judicial cancellation by correcting the technical deficiency. The Senate, again voting along party lines, quickly adjusted the bill to the court decisions, but Dillon refused to allow a vote in the House. All of this suggests a "good faith" effort to block an early primary -- as required by DNC rules.

Had not the state's highest court overturned the earlier decisions by a 4-to-3 vote just days before absentee ballots had to be mailed out, the early primary would not have been held. Significantly, all four of the judges who voted to allow the election were Republicans, and two of the judges who voted against it were Democrats.

In fact, it was a Democratic political consultant who brought the lawsuit that almost killed the primary. While the Republican state party filed an amicus brief in support of the bill, the Democrats took a barrage of editorial potshots in the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News, the Flint Journal, and other papers for refusing to stand up for the state's interest. Salivating over all the attention and revenue that would come with an early primary, the papers accused Democrats of "withering," "carrying water for presidential candidates," and "blocking a bill to rescue the election." State GOP chair Saul Anuzis declared: "The Michigan Democrats and the House Democrats in particular appear willing to blow up the primary for petty, political, selfish, self-preservationist motives, to protect their hides."

Even before the court rulings, 19 Democrats in the House co-sponsored an October bill to repeal the one that authorized the election, including eight members who'd initially voted for the January 15 date. That bill was doomed from the outset since the Senate would never agree, but it was a measure of how fiercely Democrats had come to oppose the early primary. The ultimate result in Michigan, with a triumphant Clinton the only major candidate on the ballot, is, without a doubt, a Republican result.

In Florida, Crushed by a Republican Supermajority

The Republicans don't just control both houses of the Florida legislature. Their combined 103-to-57 majority allowed them to dictate the terms of the bill that moved the primary to January 29. It is true that all but one of the state's Democratic legislators supported the bill. But a closer look reveals that vote to be more an indication of a realistic and productive compromise with the ruling Republicans than any intent to breach Democratic rules.

Florida's leading news outlets, just like Michigan's, converted an early primary into a matter of state patriotism, and that point of view, coupled with the mathematical inability to even slow the Republican push, forced Democrats to roll over.

Another factor attracting Democratic votes in the legislature for the bill was one the DNC should certainly appreciate. Governor Crist threw a reform long sought by Florida Democrats into the bill: a mandatory paper trail for all votes cast in future elections. "The Democrats have been fighting for a paper trail bill since 2000," said State Senator Nan Rich, "and Governor Bush never would support it. So finally we got a governor who was willing to support it and it ended up connected to the early primary bill. That was unfortunate. If the paper trail hadn't been there, I believe we Democrats would've all voted no. Still, if all the Republicans had voted one way and all the Democrats had voted another way, the bill would've passed." (This Christmas tree bill -- whose title alone was 154 lines long -- had something special for everyone. It would even enable Crist to run as John McCain's vice presidential candidate, revoking a ban against state officials running for federal office.)

But "the driving force behind the move," as the Tampa Tribune put it, was 36-year-old House speaker Marco Rubio, who announced that pushing the primary up was a top goal before he took over the House at the start of 2006. Branded a "Jeb acolyte" by the Florida press, Rubio, a Cuban from West Miami married to a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader, was given a gold samurai sword by Bush in a passing-of-the-conservative-mantle gesture in 2005. Rubio is a member of a wired Florida law firm whose chairman is so close to Bush that he rushed down to the county jail when the governor's daughter Noelle was arrested on a drug-related charge. When Rubio's term as speaker ends later this year, he is slated to go to work for a think tank headed by a Jeb Bush business associate. The primary bill originated with Rubio and ultimately passed the House unanimously -- but only after Democrats made what they knew would be a losing effort to alter it.

Martin Kiar and Mary Brandenburg, House Democrats who were cosponsors of the bill, tried to amend it. "We offered an amendment on the floor shifting the date to one within the Democratic party rules," said Brandenburg. "The Democrats all voted for it, and Republicans all voted against it." Actually, the Kiar/Brandenburg proposal did not completely comply with DNC directives, but it was a signal of the concerns Florida Dems had about the move-up legislation. Said Kiar: "No matter what, whether we supported it or cosponsored it, the Republican majority was going to push it through."

When the DNC sanctioned Florida, it critiqued the efforts of the Democratic leaders in both houses, suggesting that they'd merely gone through the motions of feigned opposition. But the House cosponsor of the bill, David Rivera, literally laughed on the floor at the Democratic amendment, according to the House Democrats. Going through the motions was all the outgunned Democrats could do. A DNC critic of Florida Democrats was reduced in a recent New York Times op-ed to citing remarks supporting the early primary made by state leaders after it was a fait accompli, likely because she couldn't make a case about their conduct before the Republican legislature set the date.

Some Democrats Are More Equal Than Others

The Democratic national committeeman who introduced the motion on the party's Rules Committee to deprive Florida of all its delegates -- a precursor to the Michigan decision a few months later -- was Ralph Dawson, a New York lawyer who was Howard Dean's Yale roommate and an advisor to Dean's 2004 campaign. Dawson's role was seen as a signal of Dean's appetite for a kick-ass rebuke.

As much as the DNC tries to pretend otherwise, it had choices. In fact, it later showed understandable leniency to three other states who changed their primary dates--New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina -- seating all their delegates. The tough love treatment was reserved for Michigan and Florida.

The national party had tried -- before New Hampshire's case wound up on its docket -- to leave the impression that zero tolerance was automatic once violations of the schedule occur. Back in June, a DNC spokeswoman, for example, told the Associated Press that neither Dean nor the Rules Committee "has the power to waive the rules for any state," explaining that "these rules can be changed only by the full DNC." Yet a few months later, on the same day that the Rules Committee stripped Michigan of its delegates, it waived the rules for New Hampshire, Iowa, and South Carolina, each of which had also moved up their primaries.

Though Dawson and others on Rules now say, as they did in recent interviews, that states whose contests were always scheduled before February 5 were free to shift dates without sanction, that's not what the delegate selection rules adopted in 2006 say. Those rules provided an automatic 50 percent loss of delegates for any state party that moved its contest to any day "prior to or after the dates" spelled out by the DNC.

That's why Rules powerhouse Donna Brazile said she would "grudgingly support the waiver," warning New Hampshire shortly before the December committee vote that "the days of 'privilege' may end soon."

Not only did "first-primary-or-die" New Hampshire switch from January 22 to January 8, it moved ahead of Nevada, whose January 19 caucus had been deliberately scheduled by the DNC to precede New Hampshire's. But New Hampshire's Democrats got a DNC waiver because their back was up against the wall, due to a decision by the South Carolina Republican Party to move its primary up to January 19. That unilateral decision -- which the Carolina Democrats declined to join in -- forced New Hampshire's hand. The waiver was, in other words, a reasonable response to a Republican provocation. What's unclear is why one Republican provocation is more equal than another. (Once New Hampshire moved, Iowa had to adjust as well. South Carolina Democrats ultimately made a minor switch for other reasons.)

While the DNC implicitly challenged the "good faith" of the Democratic opposition to the Republican moves in Florida and Michigan, it seemed far less interested in gauging what New Hampshire Democrats were doing. The head of the South Carolina GOP actually traveled to Concord, New Hampshire, to announce the decision to move his state's primary up. He stood in the Executive Council chambers of the statehouse with Secretary of State William Gardner and Representative James Splaine, a Democrat who led the legislative efforts to protect the state's first-primary tradition.

Democratic governor John Lynch was at a funeral when the press conference occurred, but his spokesman said Lynch "has faith in Bill Gardner" and "supports whatever Bill decides." And Lynch, who had already derided the DNC decision to put Nevada ahead of New Hampshire, was clearly pleased that the acceleration of the South Carolina Republican primary date was giving Gardner all the justification he needed to squeeze back ahead of Nevada. New Hampshire officials even called the maneuver an "alliance" with South Carolina Republicans. Gardner promptly chose a new date 11 days before Nevada, defying the schedule that the DNC had issued.

The RNC, a veritable model of consistency in these matters, stripped New Hampshire of half its delegates over the date change, even though it was unmistakably prompted by the Republican maneuver in South Carolina. But Howard Dean and company held their fire this time, examining extenuating circumstances with an understanding they refused to extend to Michigan and Florida. In the end, they changed the rules in the middle of the game, throwing the book at some states and discarding it altogether for others.

The inconsistency on New Hampshire aside, DNC officials have come up with one other argument for why they were so tough on Michigan and Florida. Dean's spokesman Damien LaVera said in an email to Huffington Post that, despite the unmistakable references in the rules to testing the "good faith" of a state's "elected officials" and examining a state's "legislative" efforts, the DNC's rules "apply to a state party plan, not state legislatures or elected officials." LaVera insisted that the only standard their Rules Committee judges compliance by is what state parties do, and that the parties in Michigan and Florida had options other than the state-designated primaries. A DNC official claimed that the Michigan party had sponsored so-called "firehouse caucuses" in the past and could have set their own date and done them again, ignoring the state-run January 15 primary. The Florida party, the DNC source added, was "offered $880,000" by the DNC to host their own caucus on a date in compliance with the DNC schedule and chose to participate, instead, in the state-financed primary, a "bad faith" decision.

But Florida party officials said the $880,000 would've only covered the cost of 150 caucus sites, with the capacity to draw a maximum of 150,000 voters out of the state's 4 million Democrats. "It wasn't a real offer," a spokesman said. Michigan's party would have had to self-finance caucuses, which, even with added Internet and mail voting, drew only 165,000 voters in 2004, a fraction of the 600,000 who voted in 2008. Stripping both states of their full delegations because the state parties in each refused to run these limited-participation caucuses--which would have occurred a couple of weeks after an official, state-financed primary -- is a bit like punishing Democrats because they like democracy.

Obama's Backers--and the Road to the Nomination

The DNC critique of Florida's noncompliance included a reference to the fact that a Democratic state senator was the initial sponsor of the move-up bill in that house, which was seen as a sign of eagerness on the part of some Democratic leaders to break the rules. That senator was Jeremy Ring, an Obama supporter. Obama even named Ring's 2006 campaign manager to run his statewide Florida effort. Ring was such a champion of the early primary that when Obama, like all the other candidates, supported the sanctions and agreed not to campaign in the state, Ring withdrew his endorsement.

When Governor Crist signed the bill at a ceremony in West Palm Beach, the man at his side was Bob Wexler, the chair of Obama's Florida campaign. Wexler wasn't there because he wanted to defy Howard Dean. He was there for the same reason that almost all the Democrats in the legislature voted for the bill. He is the state's leading foe of paperless voting systems and filed two suits against them. He saw the bill as the governor's fulfillment of a campaign pledge "to make Florida a model state for the nation in terms of our election system."

Similarly, all three of the House Democrats who endorsed Obama -- Coleman Young II, Bert Johnson, and Aldo Vagnozzi -- voted in favor of the bill to push the Michigan date forward. When Obama later took his name off the Michigan ballot, Young and Johnson became sponsors of the bill to cancel the election they had just voted to authorize.

The support of Obama's principal backers in both states for the move-up bills was hardly consequential, but it does raise questions about his current opposition to any counting or recounting of these states. If bad faith is the DNC's standard, Obama doesn't have to look too far to find alleged examples of it, and to recognize that the national party might be unfairly characterizing what the leaders in these states did.

Imagining a convention without delegations from these large and politically volatile states has become the nightmare of every thinking Democrat. Polls indicate that a nominee who refuses to count the 1.7 million Floridians who voted in a level-playing field primary, or to find a way for them to vote again, will wind up wasting whatever time and money he or she spends there in the general election campaign. As close as the general election vote in Michigan has been in recent years, even a small margin of voters disgruntled by the state's Democratic lockout could push it into the GOP column. Obama's stonewalling about both states may offer short-term advantages, but two delegations denied seating because of his maneuvers may well be seen as contrary to his populist rationale now -- and crippling to his candidacy in November.

Ed Pozzuoli, the Republican chair of Broward County, recalls the Florida showdown of 2000, when he says Democrats taunted Republicans, insisting that they should "let every vote count." He gloats now: "I guess that's changed in eight years." He's hardly the only one chortling over the likely consequence of what he calls the "draconian" Democratic spiking of his state's delegation.

What started out years ago as Howard Dean's 50-state organizing strategy for the national party now looks like a 48-state electoral one. Michigan and Florida could become the Ralph Nader of 2000, the great regret that delivers the country once again to four years of darkness.

Research assistance by: Kimberly Chin, Shaunna Murphy, Shea O'Rourke, Marguerite A. Suozzi, Adam Weinstein and John Wilwol.

Research support for this article was provided by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund.

Comments

[BlackbirdHighway]

The Democrats are so intensely stupid it makes my brain hurt. When McCain wins it will be the end of the Democratic Party. The next president after McCain will probably be Green Party or something.

[lelaji]

You're pretty optimistic that we will have a world and another election if McCain wins. I am not. The Democratic party will not be the only thing that ends if we start a war with Iran.

[Clarabell]

I think they already have.

[drbala]

Do you wonder why this reads like an academic research paper? Barret does teach Investigative Journalism at Columbia University. You should hear him speak--I remember him to be very vibrant during his lectures and his class home works/projects were well crafted to bring out the best in his students.

If we take sides with one candidate, we may not be able to read anything with the intention to learn the facts, but only through our colored glasses.

I have a feeling that anything short of a redo in FL and MI will doom the dems in November. I can understand why Obama (and his campaign) would be hesitant about a redo. What I don't understand is why Obama's followers are also hesitant to make "every vote count." It's hard to fathom democrats against a redo. We shouldn't be so taken in by a candidate's charms and personalities, after all we are going to support whoever the nominee is, right? I will, but I'm not so sure about a lot of people in this forum. There seems to be an unhealthy cultish obsession with their candidate of choice.

[ForwardtoYesterday]

Wrong. Obama and his followers are not against a redo. That's something that's happening at a State Level. However, again, this clusterf#ck, as bad as it was, was signed off by ALL the candidates, Hilary included. Her tactics are this now are nothing more than less than pure, self-interested politics.

Still, I would have liked to see a redo, though I strongly suspect it would have turned out to be a draw or close to it in any case.

[MsLiz]

I would love a re-do! Now, let's iron out the details. Do those Michigan Democrats who voted Republican in order to have a little influence, rather than none, get to vote again? That is a major problem, because I think they would be in violation of state law (correct me if I am wrong). Still, I want them to vote, since they would have voted Democrat if they thought it mattered. Who pays the cost? The Republicans in each state won't authorize the state to pay for it, and the state parties can't afford it. In Florida, they don't have voting machines available. The touch screen models have been turned in and the ones with paper trails haven't been delivered.

It isn't simple. Barrett is right, the DNC Rules Committee should have just halved the value of the delegates. That way, the candidates would have campaigned and people would have voted. If at a later date, the votes needed to be restored to full value, they could have been.

We are screwed. I am an Obama supporter, but after reading Barrett's article, I see more of the picture here. He's wrong about the level playing field in Florida, though.

[mmpost]

I agreed with you about everything you said until you threw in the cultist statement. Why is everything the weak don't understand always considered a cult? I think some of the Hillary supporters are reluctant to support Obama and think the same way I do but the other way around. As democrats, we question almost everything. We question why so many people are flocking to Obama. It is almost as if we are running blindly to him. But I have to tell you, most of us are very informed about our candidate. We have become fed up with the style of politics that have been played for so long. Hillary is a master at the old style of politics but she wasn't ready for the change that we are ready for. She didn't take it seriously. She didn't believe the people were really ready for a change and that is why she never planned for it. And I hate to say it about my fellow Dems, but you are WRONG. You are going to lose badly even if you win the nomination. I hate to say it like that because I support him. But even if his name was Edwards and had the same views and style, I would say the same thing. The Clinton and Bush names are finished! The sooner you understand this, the better off we'll be. Hillary will never EVER be a president. I love Hillary but that is the truth.

[SubparDude]

:

Paragraphs of Details and not a mention of the Prior Consent and Agreements by all candidates, not just Clinton & Obama, to "disallow both primaries" and "not participate" because they were "invalid at the outset."

Interesting omission. Writer's cred discarded.

:

[NetProphet]

MORAL IS: If you want your vote to count, move out of Florida.

[Jaradan]

Basically. Aren't Floridians tired of all the election drama, yet?

In other news, this article is B.S. Why should MI and FL's votes count if a.) both states broke party rules and b.) Barack's name wasn't even on the ballot in MI? And despite what this author says, Florida was not a "level playing field" because when neither candidate campaigned (although Hillary DID campaign despite her pledge not to), the obvious advantage goes to Hillary - the more well-known candidate.

Most authors who want to be taken seriously have links to sources other than their brain to support their assertions. You might want to do a bit more research.

[Suprshrink]

Their votes should count for the very same reason that yours counts.

[NorVaGal]

MORAL IS: If you want your vote to count, wait your turn like the voters of the remaining 48 states did. It would also help to NOT to sign agreements stating that the votes from your state will not count due to flouting primary rules.

[Suprshrink]

NorVaGal,

All I can say is do unto others... You would have thrown a fit if the same had happened to your vote but you are happy with and encourage the loss of the votes of others. It will come back to you.

[HillbillyBob]

Which we did , after Jebby getting 'elected' in 96, I could not find a single person that said they voted for him.
I also conjectured in 98 that if W ran he would be "elected" and have us in a war in a couple of years. I could also only one that would say he voted for him.
The night of the 'election' we saw ballot boxes being emptied into truck mounted shredders in the middle of the night. I wish we had had a working camera to take pics. We left in june o3 as it was all getting too weird.I have been talking about it since and have been put on the no fly list and had my house searched and received strange phone calls and emails. Which I could not save when my computer died.
Coup d etat anyone?
WSVN tv was there too, they took video that was shown a few times over the next few days then that disappeared from their site and was only shown again After the supposed recounts.

[Mollye]

Outstanding article. I am a life long Democrat. A Republican friend from Texas tells me that they are laughing their #$$@$'s off at the gullibility of the Democrats.­..of course, I said,"Wull,wull, what do you mean?" I think your article states it all. We fall for "IT" every time, only now it's being rigged by the Obama half of our own party. Please tell me how to get Howard Dean fired.

[Shozen]

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." Mollye what stage are the Rethuglicans at with the Democrats and what stage are the Clintonistas at with Obama?

[Knowsbetter]

Read my post, Sreamin Dean is the problem, along with these un-democratic caucuses, that are so not fair. If you believe caucuses are fair then you don't believe in the process of one person one vote for all not just those who were able to make it to a caucus. as usual DNC has messed it up again, let's not count the all inclusive votes but those caucuses, which are all but inclusive, are so important.

[bruce9432]

Can the dems take any responsibility without blaming those big bad Republicans? My god if they can be outsmarted by such incompetent buffoons then why try and run the country. It does seem pathetic after 8 years of whining and grinding on W that the best the dems put forward is a liar and a teflon coated half white politician. I thought for sure whoever was going wear the democratic sash would have an S on their chest.

[ForwardtoYesterday]

"Half-white"? Just what are you implying here?

[rosal]

Your Republican leaning ways are showing with your half white politician comment. Disgusting! Go back to watch Faux News and to get brainwashed.

[Toerag]

Michigan and Florida voters - please elect all new state legislatures ASAP! They're the ones to blame for this whole mess - not the DNC, not Obama.

[Amberlass]

You seem to know exactly what happened here, and I believe you are right. Not only will the Republicans win the presidency, I am sure they will win the house and senate also.

I have been a democrat all my life, but after this sheer stupidity by Howard Dean and the
Democratic Party - I frankly don't care if the Republicans win. It looks like they have figured out how to stay in office for 100 years. I think I will join them in November. I am sure a lot of other people here in Florida will join them also.

I am not going to have a candidate rammed down my throat by the DNC - I don't have to be a democrat, and I don't have to give them any more money.

[charley0008]

I think the Nation Institute Investigative Fund was misused in the case of this charade posing as an 'investigative' article.
If in fact there was any real investigation, it was selective at best. Even if the GOP did toy with the choice of primary dates, (just like they are toying with the Democratic primary by 'plunking' Republican votes for Hillary,) what does that have to do with Obama?
Obama agreed to support what ever the DNC supported & the DNC has indicated it would recognize new contests in both Florida and Michigan. The fact that both states have failed to come up with an option has nothing to do with Obama, who clearly sees this as a matter between the State & the DNC.
On the other hand, Clinton refused to support a caucus even though they are a much cheaper alternative. Pandering to Clinton, Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a Clinton super delegate, offered a 'firehouse primary' as an alternative. A firehouse primary is essentially a drop off vote at a few select locations but it is run and staffed by the state democratic party, not the State. Now that would give me hives but contrary to reports, Obama did not oppose a firehouse primary in Michigan.
The writers lack of evidence for his claim against Obama & spurious claim that it was ‘some how’ a "level playing field' in Florida suggests to me this was little more than a Clinton tract. Paid for by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund.

[Suprshrink]

A key characteristic for any Obama supporter is outlined in this post, Charley0008. In order to support Obama one must be willing to change all of your principles in a way that makes sure your candidate wins. It's okay to disenfrancise voters now, even though you didn't like it in 2000 and 2004. It's okay to block a re-vote just like it was okay to stop a recount so that the election can be blithely given to your guy. It's okay for the DNC to mimic the Supreme Court in deciding whose votes are counted. Anything that makes your candidate win is okay, right? Well, if you believed in the principles he was promoting in his campaign, you would be insisting that the votes count. You would not accept his obstructionist tactics to prevent a re-vote. If you have nothing to fear, why not count all the votes?

[Tomor]

All Clinton-backer Granholm did, however, was a sign a bill.


Amazing -- Democrats blaming the GOP for decisions made by Democrats. Granholm knows how to veto bills - she vetoed the partial birth abortion restictions in the LIve Birth Definition Act.

If the Democrats can not even get a state primary election right, how do they then assert that they are qualified to govern the nation on really important issues?

[Caro]

CONTINUED FROM A PREVIOUS COMMENT:

It occurred to me that Mr. Rove's most important objective has to be to make sure he doesn't go to prison after Bush leaves the White House. His second most important objective has to be to make sure Bush doesn't go to prison. I'm sure that Bush will try a pre-emptive pardon for himself and for everyone in his administration, but a Democrat in the White House might try to question those pardons. The only restriction of the president’s pardon power is "in cases of impeachment". If Congress were to start impeachment proceedings before Bush can issue the pardons, it might be possible for an incoming president who cared about the law and about the Constitution to challenge those pardons in court.
How to stop the challenges? Make sure a Republican is elected in November. And maybe even make sure a Republican who has made a promise that there will be no investigations and no prosecutions of members of the Bush administration. Did McCain make such a promise?

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I think Rove's involvement in the Democratic primaries goes deeper than the timing of Michigan's and Florida's primaries.

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

[Larry Kegel]

Obama People only want to count the votes for him... If Florida & Michigan were for him... They be in a long time ago... It's a shame that every vote doesn't count in this Election..­. If it did... Hillary would have won already... I for one will not vote for Obama.. But I also wouldn't vote for McCain... Thats what all of us that feel Hillary should win should do... The Obama People feel they don't need them anyhow... te truth will be told if he wins he was rigt... He loses he was wrong... I think he is wrong... Thats the sad part of it...

[mornacm]

Republicans were urged to be Democrats for a Day and vote for Clinton, not Obama. The Republicans want Hillary as the candidate because they don't think she can win the general election - too many people despise her. They don't want Obama because they don't think they can beat him.

[Caro]

I started to wonder months ago about whether the Republicans were messing with the Democratic primaries, but I wasn't thinking so much about Florida and Michigan.

We've had much strangeness in this year's primaries:

How did John McCain come from nowhere in the polls and having no money to being the presumptive Republican nominee?
How did Obama win in Iowa, where Clinton led in the polls?
How did Clinton win in New Hampshire, where Obama led in the polls?
How did Obama pull off that string of victories in red states? Hint: in many of those contests, Republicans were encouraged to be "Democrats for a day" so that they could vote for Obama.

The only time in my many years on earth that I've seen these kinds of shifts and realignments and anomalies has been when Karl Rove was involved somehow. Think 2000. Think 2004.

CONTINUED IN THE NEXT COMMENT, BECAUSE THIS STUPID SOFTWARE DOESN'T LET ME MAKE A COMMENT AS LONG AS I WANT--Carolyn Kay

[eanderso]

"How did Obama pull off that string of victories in red states? Hint: in many of those contests, Republicans were encouraged to be "Democrats for a day" so that they could vote for Obama."

Um...you do know that Republicans were encouraged to be "Democrats for a day" in Ohio and Texas too, right? So just how big was Obama's margin of victory in those states?

[PrdAmerican]

The people who should pay for this disgrace are the party officials who allowed this to happen in the first place....t­he state officials elected by the citizens of the state. Let's hope those up for re-election this year suffer the consequences of their actions.

[jrterrier]

Did you read this? The FL and MI state delegations are controlled by Republicans. The Dems in both legislatures could have held their breath and gone on hunger strikes and not been able to change the dates.

What is despicable is that the DNC has allowed this to happen, that Sen Obama and the DEM elected officials like Leahy and Dodd, who should know better continue their complicity in denying the Dem voters of both states to cast votes and the the media has continued to concoct a story.

For a Dem party that is up in arms about how we went to war in Iraq based on lies or misstatements by the administration, which the media actively repeated and failed to uncover, this is just one more expample of the duplicity of the media to whatever lies it prefers.

Shame on Senator Obama and his supporters for perpetuating this denial of votes.