Michigan and Florida

My friend Sue originally hails from Michigan and has strong and valid feelings about it being represented in the Democratic nominating process. She brought a couple of items to my attention recently. The first shows how the total vote counts for Hillary and Obama vary depending on which states are counted, and the second reports on a Florida poll which shows a significant number of Democrats would vote for McCain if their primary votes aren't counted.

I share her concerns about Michigan's voters and feel the same for Florida's. Both are relatively big states, but that's not really the issue. This is an important election that's generated more interest and energy than we've seen in a generation, and voters in both of those states want to take part and have their voices matter.

But here's my problem: having Florida and Michigan be part of the process has to be for those reasons and not for political ones that advantage one candidate.

The time to have spoken up about the problem was last fall. That's when the Democratic candidates were asked to sign a pledge stating that they would not "campaign or participate" in states that held their primaries before February 5th (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina were excepted).

Now you can argue about the merits of the pledge, but again, the time to do that is before you sign it. Yet Hillary, like Obama and the other Democratic candidates, signed the pledge months before either Florida or Michigan voters went to the polls.

The time to have spoken up about Florida and Michigan being represented in this process was back when they moved up the dates of their primaries and when the Democratic National Committee sanctioned them for doing so. Instead, Hillary made it an issue after she lost Iowa and suddenly realized that she had a campaign ahead of her that was more difficult than she had planned on.

Some have argued that in Florida it was a Republican legislature that moved up the date of the primary, and it's therefore unfair to penalize Democrats in that state. But that logic is out of step with how our society works. I don't have the luxury of not paying taxes passed by a legislature when the "other" party is in the majority. I can't opt out of a law that was passed when my guys weren't in power. My recourse is to petition my representatives to get the law changed, and failing that, to get someone else elected or to move so that I'm not impacted again.

None of what happened was a surprise. The DNC published the rules and warned states that they would be penalized if they were violated. To let the states--and Hillary's campaign--game the system now simply trains people to keep doing the same thing in the future: namely to do whatever they think is in their best interest even if it means not playing by the rules. It reinforces a mentality of believing that the rules can be changed after the fact when they become inconvenient. And it's particularly nauseating when someone claims disingenuously to be standing up for someone else's rights when they are really trying to save their own ass.

Michigan and Florida represent real problems. I'm disappointed that the Obama campaign didn't propose a compromise (like mine) that would offer some sort of solution, as doing so would have demonstrated his ability to move beyond this kind of stalemate.

But I'm even more disappointed in Hillary for arguing that Michigan's primary should count when her opponent's name didn't even appear on the ballot or for making an issue of both states only when her own political future depended on their votes.