Florida Revisited
Well, the crap hit the fan for the dems. Now it becomes a matter of who has the delegates (none of them probably will have the majority by the end of the race), who has the momentum (which seems to be changing hourly), and who has the superdelegates (I don’t think the superdelegates know what they are going to do).
But the giant elephant in the room is not John McCain, who secured his bid for the Republicans last night, but Florida and Michigan. I flipped on CNN and they were doing a report on Florida and its democrats. Last night during CNN coverage, I believe Wolf Blitzer said that Howard Dean was adamant about not seating the Florida delegates based on the earlier primary. Today I saw Florida democrats (Bill Nelson and a rep) say that they were against rerunning the primary or a caucus. Nelson said that Florida had no history of a caucus and was not truly representative and that Florida already paid $18 million for the first primary. Therefore, the Senator would only be interested in rerunning the race in Florida if the DNC picked up the tab. The Representative suggested that Congress might make a move by somehow forcing the DNC to seat the delegates, including somehow preventing the candidate nominated by the DNC from running.
Now that last threat, which everyone here knows, is ludicrous. Even the CNN commentator said that some “constitutional experts” he had talked to said that that type of threat was “probably unconstitutional.” To say nothing of stupid and a death wish on the part of Congress. But that being said, the comments that these people are throwing around is serious. The fact the state dems are against rerunning the election, that the state is run by a Republican governor who would love from a political standpoint the chaos this issue could cause, and that Hillary won by a sizable margin in that state will make this a bigger issue as the primary season goes on. The lack of a desire to compromise which I saw will make this just one more issue that makes the democratic race far from the cakewalk everyone envisioned in 2006.
Comment by Billy Joe Mills on 5 March 2008 at 1:50 pm:
Good analysis. Hillary has to be Pisseddddd that the Florida Dems didn’t get their act together enough to make Florida count. Florida has a large Latino population, which has been one of Hillary’s strong points vs. Obama