I can't really be the definitive voice of Michigan, but it bugs the hell out of me that HRC and Lanny Davis talk like they are. I'm not terribly well-connected, but I don't live in a cave and I've found it pretty tough here in the land of Reagan Democrats to find anyone outside of the political profession who is cheering on the self-appointed champions of counting Michigan's votes.
All of the people who were supposed to be looking out for us sold us out to the Clinton Machine, because they believed in the myth of inevitability. As "Party Leaders and Elected Officials" they have betrayed the people of Michigan and it seems to me as a Democrat in Michigan that if the bogus results of the not-really-a-primary they engineered are to be honored in any way, there is an obvious limit on how the RBC can do so and still impose a well-deserved punishment for the people who made this anti-democratic and party-threatening mistake.
I'll start with some simple points. There's a few long diaries worth of explanation that might be helpful behind these, but I'm not writing those...
- Being an early primary is not and never has been a grass-roots issue in Michigan.
- The Democratic "leaders" who engineered the bogus primary were (and mostly are) Clinton partisans.
- Michigan as a legitimate "firehouse caucus" the Saturday after Super Tuesday was a far worse risk for the Clinton inevitability plan than a renegade primary ahead of Super Tuesday, because:
a. The not-so-foreign place south of the river is not Kentucky, it's Canada.
b. A Clinton campaign being run by a union-busting consultant has some vulnerabilities with the UAW, other unions, workers who might be in unions were it not for Clintonism, and people who might still have jobs were it not for Clinton-Bush trade policies.
c. Michigan has a bunch of reasons to distrust collaborators in the Bush war on civil liberties.
- Contrary to Clinton campaign talking points, there wasn't any widely-understood campaign for Obama supporters to vote for "Uncommitted" in the primary. There were actually mixed messages, with some ethically-challenged folks calling for Democrats to engage in disruption of the GOP primary.
The bottom line is that even if there wasn't a plan to screw up the Michigan delegate selection process to protect Clinton from the voters of Michigan, that's what the effect was. That was not done by the people, it was done by the politicians. As I read the rules, the handling of superdelegates and elected delegates under scheduling penalties are distinct. That makes it easy for the RBC to both honor the expressed and inferable wishes of the voters in Michigan and to punish the people responsible for creating this problem. Whatever they do about elected delegates, whether it means reducing the delegate count per district or reducing the strength of delegate votes or even seating all of the pledged delegates with full votes, the would-be superdelegates for Michigan should be left to watch the convention on television. The state party officials and the state elected officials who gave us this fiasco should also be ineligible for selection as pledged delegates. These people have sabotaged the national nomination process and abused the trust of the people of Michigan, and whatever their intent in doing so, they've proven themselves unfit for further involvement in the process this time around. The open cynicism of people like Mark Brewer as the MDP helped create a national catastrophe for the party cannot go unpunished.
Of course, there also has to be a long-term fix of the scheduling mess, but that really should wait until this year is unequivocally over, but before the next nominating process is anywhere near.