Delegate Dilemma

The democrats had their much-discussed meeting to decide the fate of the delegation from Michigan and Florida.

The problem began when Michigan and Florida decided to push up their presidential primaries to have more influence on deciding the nominee. This was in violation of democrat party rules. The democrat party denied delegates to a primary held in violation of its rules. To enforce this, the democrat candidates agreed not to campaign in Michigan and to take their names off the ballot. Except that Hillary Clinton "forgot" to do this. Oops!

Naturally, Hillary won a big victory over nobody in the Michigan primary, with "uncommitted" taking second place.

Everybody thought the issue would be resolved once a candidate wrapped up the nomination. But that ended up taking a lot longer than expected. So the democrats had a meeting to figure out what to do.

One proposal, favored by Hillary, was to give Hillary all the delegates she 'won' in her uncontested victory, with Obama getting all the 'uncommitted' delegates. But this isn't actually how people voted. Though many people voting for 'uncommitted' undoubtedly supported Obama, one cannot assume that all of them did.

A second proposal, favored by Obama, would split Michigan's delegates equally. Of course, this has nothing whatsoever to do with the results of the primary.

More recently, a proposed compromise would split the difference between the two proposals. But the democrat committee still wanted to punish Michigan and Florida for breaking the rules, so it adopted the compromise proposal but only gave each delegate half a vote.

Once again, none of this has anything to do with any actual election result. Up until now, one could actually respect the democrats for enforcing their own rules. But this recent decision was totally made up, having nothing to do with the rules.

But with democrats, this is hardly a surprise.

It is worth noting that Senator Carl Levin was key to moving up Michigan's primary and creating this whole mess in the first place. The policies that he advocates are about as effective as his primary effort.