Clinton needs Florida and Michigan to remain undetermined. The more uncertainty she can cast on the status of the delegate count and popular vote, the better her (already thin) arguments to the super delegates she can make.
Florida and MIchigan broke DNC rules by moving up their contests ahead of the DNC-sanctioned calendar. At the time, Clinton approved of the move. Her chief campaign pit-bull, even voted for the sanctions as a sitting member of the rules committee.
Harold Ickes, a top adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign who voted for Democratic Party rules that stripped Michigan and Florida of their delegates, is arguing against the very penalty he helped pass [...]
Ickes explained that his different position essentially is due to the different hats he wears as both a DNC member and a Clinton adviser in charge of delegate counting. Clinton won the primary vote in Michigan and Florida, and now she wants those votes to count.
"There's been no change," Ickes said. "I was not acting as an agent of Mrs. Clinton. We had promulgated rules, and those rules said the timing provision . . . provides for certain sanctions, automatic sanctions as a matter of fact, if a state such as Michigan or Florida violates those timing provisions.
"With respect to the stripping, I voted as a member of the Democratic National Committee. Those were our rules, and I felt I had an obligation to enforce them," he said.
But given that the rules don't apply when wearing his "Clinton campaign" hat, the status of Michigan and Florida have been a Clinton campaign obsession ever since.
Now it's clear that neither Florida or Michigan have the money or political will to stage new contests. And while the Obama campaign has no impetus to seat the delegations until after the nominee has been chosen, the status of those two states inject enough FUD to fuel Clinton's efforts. If their status was settled, then Clinton's still perilous math position would be obvious and unassailable.
I say seat them 50-50. End of story. But the Clinton campaign would never agree. The dean of Florida's DNC delegation has two solutions:
Ausman's first equation, resulting in a six-delegate net for Clinton, involves halving the state's number of unpledged delegates and then applying the state's primary results by congressional district as called for in the party's own rules.
The second formula, resulting in a 19-delegate net for Clinton, reverses the math, applying the state's primary results by congressional district to the state's unpledged delegates and then halving that number. Obama's campaign has all but rejected the second formula, Ausman said.
Ausman's proposed fix differs from one offered last week by two South Florida state senators who proposed basing the number of delegates from Florida on the outcome of the Jan. 29 vote and on the outcome of the rest of the nation's primaries, excluding Florida and Michigan, which the DNC also penalized.
Ausman's formulas are being studied by DNC staff and could go before the DNC's Rules & Bylaws Committee as early as next week.
Settling Florida with only a 6-delegate loss would be a great outcome for Obama. He likely couldn't do better in a real contest.
The only downside to the Obama camp would be the Clinton effort to try and inject Clinton's 288,167 popular-vote margin into the debate over the overall popular vote, but few supers would take that seriously.
As for Michigan, stick with 50-50, then halve their delegation.