nimh wrote:even Clinton supporters at the party rules committee rejected her demand to count both of the rogue primaries of Michigan and Florida in full, and not assign Obama a single delegate from Michigan. Instead, they used the allocation that the Michigan Democrats had been arguing for already for months (69/59), when they decided to halve the voting rights of these delegates. [..]
And make no mistake: this was already a compromise the rules committee opted for. The Obama campaign had argued for a 50/50 split of Michigan delegates, and apparently Donna Brazile said yesterday on ABC with George Stephanopoulos that he had the votes on the committee to get the 50/50 split. But he took the high road and compromised for the 69/59 split.
This is probably also what NBC's Chuck Todd was referring to when
he wrote that during the extended luncheon meeting the committee broke for, "Florida was not a problem," but on Michigan "it looked as if the agreement they were going to come to was going to pass by a razor-thin, one or two person, majority, [so] they went back because they didn't want that. They wanted a closer show of unaninimity."
And that's how they got to the current solution. There was a majority for an even stricter rejection of Hillary's claims.
So what really happened at the meeting of the Rules and Bylaws Committee?
They broke for an extended, three-hour private lunch break after all. What was discussed?
Well, now we know.
The Obama camp came looking for a 50/50 split of Michigan delegates. After all, the DNC had decided previously to strip the state of its delegates if it would break the rules; it broke the rules anyway; changing the rules midway during the game would be cheating. And the Clinton campaign's Harold Ickes had voted for that decision himself.
Moreover, unlike in Florida, there was even just one major candidate on the ballot, making the result something very different from a fair reflection of the preferences of Michigan Democrats. There are many Dems in Michigan who stayed at home because their preferred candidate wasnt on the ballot and the DNC told them their vote wouldnt count anyway; you cant then fairly decide that the elections that went on regardless count anyway.
Now here's the crucial part:
Obama's camp had the votes on the committee to approve its solution. But it didnt, because it wanted to seek a compromise to meet Hillary supporters halfway. This is
what the committee's co-chair James Roosevelt says:
Quote:Roosevelt said the Obama camp's proposal for Michigan was for a 50-50 split, and, "it was pretty clear the votes were there for the 50-50 split on Michigan, but they did not push for that," Roosevelt said. "I believe that the supporters of Obama on the committee believed that if Senator Clinton netted delegates out of Michigan there was a possibility of resolving this on an amicable basis," Roosevelt said.
So instead of pushing its own take through with a bare majority, Obama's people decided to go part of the way with the Michigan Democratic party's solution.
The Michigan Dems have been proposing for many weeks now to divide the delegates as follows: 69 for Hillary, 59 for Obama. These numbers are also based on the primary results, but take into account the ways they werent representative. They take into account that of the people who went to the polls, those who preferred Hillary could and did vote for her, while those who voted Uncommitted thus were basically voting 'not Hillary'. Moreover, they take into account that Hillary got more votes than she would have gotten if there had been serious opponents on the ballot. Regarding these same considerations, Roosevelt says, the Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) also "took into account exit polling data and the fact that there were about 30,000 uncounted write-in ballots".
The result was a broad compromise. "[T]he Michigan Democratic Party, and a leading Clinton ally in the state, Governor Jennifer Granholm, as well as Senator Carl Levin, [..] all agreed" to the 69-59 split of Michigan delegates.
But the Clinton camp would absolutely not budge. Not just did it want 4 extra delegates for Clinton, to reflect the full percentage she got in her race against nobody; it did not want to assign any delegates to Obama at all. The rest of the delegates should remain uncommitted, so those could in their turn
be divided up between Hillary and Obama - giving her a greater share of the state's vote than she even got against nobody in the actual primary. Roosevelt says the Clinton presidential campaign continued to dispute the attempt at compromise; and meanwhile Clinton partisans attending the meeting "booed and heckled frequently during the public, televised morning and evening sessions."
That was too much for even some of the committed Clinton supporters in the committee. And so, whereas earlier the assumption was that the meeting would draw into a second day, over two-thirds of the committee members sided with the compromise the same day. They went with a 69/59 division to best reflect the preferences of the Michigan Democrats
and halved the vote of these delegates as sanction for the party breaking the primary rules. The Clinton camp's opposition to the motion was defeated by 19 to 8 votes.
In so many ways, the course of events at the RBC seem to illustrate exactly what went wrong with the Clinton campaign...
