You've seriously got to be kidding me. That was the thought that went through my head after reading Lanny Davis' "compromise" proposal in the Politico regarding MI and FL. A "compromise" proposal that claims to be "generous" to Obama by giving Hillary Clinton 75% of the delegates out of MI.
You read that right. SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT.
The details:
It is rather simple. Go back, in effect, to the status quo ante and make some reasonable and fair adjustments.
In Michigan, Clinton received 55 percent of the vote. According to Thegreenpapers.com, she thus should receive 73 pledged delegates based on that percentage.
What about the 50 remaining uncommitted delegates, and 7 collectively cast for Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, who were also on the ballot?
Some of those 50 delegates might have been for Clinton as a second choice to candidates other than Obama, so it would be totally unfair to award all 50 delegates to Obama.
One little known fact: Clinton complied with party rules by allowing her name to remain on the ballot, as did Dodd and Kucinich. Obama was not forced by party rules to remove his name — he chose to do so.
The Rules Committee has several options. The fairest would be to allocate those 57 pledged delegates, to Clinton and Obama by the same ratio of their standing to one another in the average of the most recent Michigan statewide polls prior to the Jan. 15 primary. Or perhaps one Solomonic compromise, more generous to Obama than to Clinton, would be to divide the remaining delegates approximately 50-50 between the two of them, 28-27 (giving Clinton the extra delegate since she led in all the latest statewide polls prior to Jan. 15).
Florida's compromise solution is even easier. Clinton won 50 percent of the vote, while Obama won 33 percent of the 1.7 million Democratic votes cast. According to Thegreenpapers.com, that would give Clinton 105 delegates and Obama 69 delegates. That leaves 11 elected John Edwards delegates yet to decide, as well as 13 still unpledged superdelegates. (Eight supers have already decided for Clinton and five have decided for Obama).
Look, everyone. I understand spin. I also understand the bunker mentality of Hillaryland at the moment. I recently watched the HBO movie "Recount" rehashing the 2000 Florida fiasco that Clinton regularly references. Similar to James Baker and the other Bushies, the Clintonites see this as "nothing less than a street fight for the Presidency of the United States." But the Bush crowd at least could make a colorable argument that the rules were on their side. It was intellectually dishonest and inconsistent with the basic tenets of democracy, but at least it was a real argument.
What Lanny Davis has described here goes beyond even that. His convoluted logic claims that, perhaps, those voting "Uncommitted" may have been voting for another candidate (Edwards, perhaps) but would have voted for Clinton second.
First, I didn't realize Lanny Davis was such a fan of instant runoff voting! What a concept!
Second, and more importantly, by this convoluted logic Hillary should get all the delegates from votes directly cast for her, but HALF of the delegates from votes cast as "Uncommitted" because somehow they had a better candidate they wanted to vote for, but she would've been second.
Even though she was on the freaking ballot!
It's the equivalent of John Ashcroft claiming that he should've gotten half of Mel Carnahan's votes for Senate because now that he died in the plane crash, there may have been folks who would've voted for him as second place.
The complexities of this ridiculous argument aside, does he realize how absurd it is to call something a "compromise" that "generous[ly]" gives three-quarters of the delegates to Hillary?
To even propose such a "compromise" is the most brazen episode of chutzpah I've seen in national politics for a long time. For the Politico to even publish this piece (piece of something...) betrays either complicity in the Clinton campaign delusion, or an implicit acknowledgment that publishing such an absurdity is giving the Clinton campaign enough rhetorical rope with which to hang itself.
YOU PEOPLE NEED TO GO AWAY NOW. KTHXBAI!
UPDATE:Commenter no expert reminds us that Poblano did one of his famous regression analyses and postulated that Obama would've actually won Michigan narrowly. Yet another reason Davis' "compromise" is ridiculous on its face.