The Smelly Cheese

Super Delegates and Florida fucking up our elections... again.

In case you've been holed up in your house watching all those episodes of American Gladiators you missed, the Democrats have a big potential mess on their hands.
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2008/02/obama_campaign_manager_clinton.html?hpid=topnews

The basic problem is that Florida and Michigan moved up their primaries by being told by the DNC, " I swear to god you two, if you move those primaries I'm gonna turn this car around right now!!" Additionally, voters are more concerned than ever with "superdelegates." These are senators and congress-people that wield numerous delegates with their own vote. Most people have never been too concerned with superdelegates this early in an election year since most primary contests are this close this late in the game.

Hillary wants to "seat" the delegates from Florida and Michigan largely because she won those primaries, but there's also a little sliver of a thing called democracy mixed into it. Obama wants the "Super People," to vote alongside their own consituencies. The idea being that you're congress-person shouldn't vote against the majority of the people that elect them to office. That makes sense on a macro-level, but kind of flies in the face of the idea that individuals are free to vote for any candidate they like.

The Democratic party is hamstrung by their own archaic rules. The Florida election board or some other stuffy organization decided to move up their primaries by one week. Michigan moved theirs up by two weeks. Then some equally stuffy people at the national democratic party headquarters said, "No, we don't like that. So you don't get to come to our party at the end of year." Did moving up the primaries somehow cause a molecular shift in the time-space continuum? I'm gonna guess not. So it's simply an argument of, "Well... if I let one person move their primary then I'm gonna have to let everybody move their primary." Florida and Michigan dared to mock the sanctity and tradition the Democratic National Committee and now the party is telling a few million voters that they can "sit in their room and think about what they did."
The really insane thing is virtually every other state in the union moved it's primary up on the schedule this year.

So isn't the "democratic" thing to do is either count those two states votes or have them re-vote? The Obama campaign doesn't think Florida and Michigan should be rewarded for "breaking the rules" of the party. A rule is a rule is a rule is a rule. Except when un-democratic ideas could go against his campaign. The Obama people want superdelegates to be bound to the votes of their consituents even though the DNC, through its own rules and regulations, has given more power and delegates to these specific "super" people. Super delegates have voted against the majority of their districts before and have every right do so according to the bylaws of their own party.

And let's be honest here, it doesn't matter which candidate we're talking about. If Clinton was the candidates on a 9-state winning streak with Obama hoping that Texas and Ohio pull through for him, his campaign supporters and staff would be holding rallies with signs declaring, "Let Them Vote!!!" It is refreshing to see that electioneering is indeed "color" and "gender" blind in 2008.

The Democratic party can either stick to its guns and obey all the rules all the time or they can actually throw caution to the wind and do something truly radical. Use common sense.

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