By Catharine Skipp and Arian Campo-Flores
After so much wrangling over what to do about the Democratic delegates from Florida and Michigan, things remain as inconclusive as ever. On Monday, the Florida Democratic party essentially threw its hands in the air and gave up on trying to arrange a do-over of the state’s primary. And yesterday, plans for a re-vote in Michigan suffered a potentially fatal setback. Where does that leave things? Negotiations are going on behind the scenes among the DNC, top advisers to the Obama and Clinton campaigns and the state parties, says a Democratic insider unaffiliated with either campaign. The hope is to find an agreement that is seen by the campaigns and their supporters as fair. Yet many fear that Democratic voters, who for a long while seemed happy with either candidate, are increasingly favoring one candidate to the exclusion of the other.
The Obama and Clinton campaigns continue to polarize by the day. On a Clinton campaign conference call Tuesday, deputy communications director Phil Singer argued that the Obama campaign’s refusal to promote re-vote plans in both states amounts to “a passive-aggressive effort on the part of the Obama campaign to disenfranchise the voters of Michigan and Florida.” Allan Katz, an Obama donor and a superdelegate from Florida, says, “Everyone is saying the DNC created this problem for us, but these are the rules we all voted for. … All the campaigns said they would stand by the rules, with no delegates seated in Florida and Michigan. Now, after the fact, some are saying they should count.”
Given that do-over contests appear to have been ruled out, the focus shifts to the DNC’s rules and bylaws committee and the credentialing committee. The rules committee, which voted to strip the Florida and Michigan delegates in the first place, doesn’t have a meeting scheduled to address the issue, according to the DNC. But the Florida Democratic party says it plans to appeal to that committee. Beyond July 1, any delegate-allocation issues would be taken up by the credentialing committee, which has plenty of flexibility to decide on a remedy, such as seating only half the delegates or splitting them 50-50 between the candidates.
All of this has prompted spasms of finger-pointing. "The situation we're in is unfortunate, but you have to remember that the Republicans moved the primary, not us," says Karen Thurman, Florida Democratic party chair. Yet the bill moving up the date was passed with overwhelming Democratic support. "I have no recollection of the state party throwing a fit about moving the primary to January 29th," says Frank Sanchez, a Tampa-based Obama supporter and adviser on Latin America. "So it rings a little hollow to say the Republicans did this. If we had said at the time, 'This is wrong, this is a mistake and we should not be doing this,' then we could say the DNC has no grounds to punish us." However, he adds, "the DNC went overboard in the punishment. It didn't fit the violation."
Many of the state's Democrats now wish the primary date had remained March 11, as originally scheduled. Had the contest been held on that date, “we would have had all the things we wanted to have without paying the price," says former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham. "We would have had most of the candidates’ attention--there was only one other state primary that day--and at a dramatic and significant point in the process. It could have, under the right circumstances, been determinative in the same way Florida ended up being determinative in the Republican process: Giuliani got out, and Romney and the field cleared except for Mr. Huckabee. That might have happened if Florida had voted on the second Tuesday in March rather than the last Tuesday in January.” Unfortunately, it's all water under the bridge now.
