Reply #23: Salon has some background [View All]

Even though they privately nurtured few illusions that in Michigan they could escape the half-vote penalty exacted on Florida, the Clinton forces did hope that the state's delegation would be seated based on the primary results, which would net Clinton nine convention votes (18 flesh-and-blood delegates). They also had dreams of prevailing on an arcane, but conceivably significant, point: depriving Obama of any veto power over the delegates on the Michigan "Uncommitted" slate. Democratic rules buttressed the Clinton arguments over Michigan, since there is an overwhelming bias toward accepting primary results as valid and the "Uncommitted" option is, bizarrely enough, treated as if it were an actual candidate.

But politics is ultimately about votes, and Clinton -- even though she had 13 supporters on the rules committee -- did not have them. When the committee took test votes over lunch (and holdouts like Donna Brazile, Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager, finally chose sides), there was a surprising 14-to-13 majority for evenly dividing the Michigan delegation between Obama and Clinton. (The co-chairs of the committee, Alexis Herman and James Roosevelt, only vote in case of ties, while Mark Brewer, the Michigan party chairman, could not vote on matters affecting his state). Such a split-the-difference verdict in Michigan would have been the most generous possible outcome for Obama, since even the state party's own compromise proposal gave Clinton a five-vote (10-delegate) edge.

But the Obama supporters also recognized that overturning the results of the Michigan primary by a one-vote margin in the rules committee would be a Pyrrhic victory. Brewer warned his colleagues during the luncheon that such a result would ruin the Democratic Party in Michigan, since the Clinton supporters would be enraged over the sellout. Desperate to salvage anything from the wreckage, five Clinton supporters on the committee (Don Fowler, Mame Reilly, Elaine Kamarck, Michael Steed and Alice Huffman) belatedly embraced the compromise floated by Brewer and the Michigan party that awarded Clinton a 10-delegate edge. This required a bit of intellectual backtracking since during the earlier public session, Fowler, Reilly and Kamarck had all critiqued the Michigan proposal as arbitrary and irrational in its arithmetic that trimmed Clinton's 73-to-55 delegate margin from the primary to a 69-59 Clinton-Obama split.

-snip

After the committee adjourned, Steed, a former DNC official, explained the logic behind the compromise in an interview, saying, "Our goal was what could be done to unify the party. The only unity proposal on the table was the Michigan proposal, so we accepted it." Kamarck, a former top Gore aide, put it simply, "It was the only answer."

In theory, Saturday's rules committee Michigan decision can be appealed to a new body -- the convention's Credentials Committee, when it comes into existence in July. Ickes, in fact, raised just that specter in his final remarks on the Michigan vote and the Clinton acolytes in the audience chanted, "Denver! Denver!" But, in reality, a formal challenge of Saturday's decision can only be brought by a Michigan convention delegate, not by the Clinton campaign itself. The odds are prodigious that -- under almost any scenario -- the four votes that Clinton theoretically lost in the rules committee will not matter by Denver.