Say Anything Blog

Although I’d like to see Hillary Clinton be the Democrat nominee as she - along with the over two decades of Clinton baggage she’d have to carry with her - would ultimately lose in the general election to John McCain, it’d be a terrible injustice for the Democrats to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida.

Remember that both states had their delegates removed after they moved their primary dates up against DNC wishes.

February 14, 2008 — The Rev. Al Sharpton yesterday said the Democratic Party would commit a “grave injustice” if it seated delegates from Florida and Michigan at the party’s national convention - and he threatened a march on the party’s Washington headquarters.

Sharpton’s call - detailed in a letter to Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean - came a day after the NAACP leader Julian Bond urged party officials to seat delegates from the two states, saying that not to do so would risk “disenfranchising” minorities.

Both Florida and Michigan were stripped of their delegates to the Democratic convention after their legislatures set the dates of their primaries before Feb. 5 in defiance of the national party.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won both contests and has recently called for delegates from both states to have access at the convention in late summer.

But supporters of Barack Obama have argued that such a move would be unfair to him, and several Democratic insiders have expressed concern that the party would suffer painful infighting if Clinton prevailed.

Sharpton wrote: “I firmly believe that changing the rules now and seating delegates from Florida and Michigan at this point would not only violate the Democratic Party’s rules of fairness, but also would be a grave injustice.”

Hillary won in Michigan and Florida but was largely unopposed in both states.  None of the other candidates spent any real time campaigning there because they made a calculated decision to focus their attention on the states that would have delegates.  If the other candidates knew that Florida and Michigan would eventually get their delegates I’m sure the other candidates would have campaigned there.

The time for the Democrats to change their minds about these states’ delegates has come and gone.  Hillary’s calculated support for seating these delegates, which has only manifested itself after she won the primaries in both states, and the apparent backing she’s getting from the NAACP simply does not matter.

Though, to be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Clintons pull this out and take home the nomination based on reinstating these delegates either.  It wouldn’t be moral, or democratic, but when was the last time the Democrats were actually democratic about much of anything?