Not a single person in our state with whom I have been in contact has agreed with me that Florida is out of line. I suspect a few of my friends do, but here party disloyalty is not tolerated.
Oh, wait...make that state level it is not tolerated. It is just fine and dandy to tell the national party you are not going to follow the rules. I guess I expected more to agree with me, but if they do they won't speak up. It's like that here. :shrug:
So I felt better when I saw these articles and columns. I now know I am not alone.
LA Times: Get in Line, Florida.
Why don't we just vote for president tomorrow and be done with it?Why don't we just vote for president tomorrow and be done with it? That would be the logical extension of the states' battle to get to, or at least near, the presidential primary starting line. California and 14 other states that wanted to weigh in early enough to make a difference picked Feb. 5 for their primaries, creating what's being called Super-Duper Tuesday because it's a month earlier and includes twice as many states as the Super Tuesdays of old. Now Florida lawmakers, unhappy at having their state's vote stuck in March, have decided to leapfrog that pack and set their nominating election for Jan. 29.
Not this time. The Democratic National Committee responded with some welcome party rigor: If you jump ahead of the Super-Dupers, the committee told Florida, your delegates will not be seated at the convention. The DNC's Republican counterpart has now made clear that it too will penalize states that hold early primaries.
And USA Today has a great idea about what to do with these bully states.
Boot rule-breaking states to the back of the lineBoot rule-breaking states to the back of the line. Our view on picking a president: Boot rule-breaking states to the back of the line. Parties step in to stop primary leapfrog. It’s about time.
Finally, some adult supervision is coming to the process of picking presidential nominees. And not a moment too soon.
Republican and Democratic party officials have stepped in to try to stop states from leapfrogging each other to set earlier and earlier primaries. The states' goal is to enhance their voters' influence by going first, hardly a malevolent motive.
But the resulting pell-mell scramble for the front of the line is threatening to push the first presidential voting into this year's holiday season, almost a year before the 2008 election, and then produce nominees as early as Feb. 5, a time when the public ordinarily would just be tuning into the race.
...."Just picture the result: The vetting process that gradually weeds out weaker candidates while giving others momentum will be truncated — an important loss this time around with large, wide-open fields in both major parties for the first time in decades."
Further the Palm Beach Post says Florida is looking bad again, only this time it is self-inflicted.
Primary bully Florida ought to be ashamedFriday, August 31, 2007
It's not a very proud time to be a Floridian.
We're looking bad again - and deservedly so. It's over voting. (Surprise!) And this time, a purely self-inflicted
Unfortunately, there's no good way to honey-coat this. Florida's transgression is something that people can understand, even if they have no interest in politics. It's one of those things you learn in kindergarten: Don't cut in line.
In this case, the national political parties have created a lineup of state primaries, spacing out the state-by-state votes on a schedule designed to be politically beneficial to the parties.
Does it make sense? You could make the argument that the early-voting states, Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada serve as a kind of spring-training season, where candidates gain credibility, or lose it, before the bigger states with lots of electoral votes weigh in.
The wisdom of the lineup, though, is beside the point. What's important is that without the national parties imposing some kind of order, there would be the kind of anarchy you see at a supermarket when a new cash register opens and a swarm of shopping carts collide trying to get there first.
And the Miami Herald has noticed, as have many of us have, that Bill Nelson really can get upset about Howard Dean. It has been especially noticeable lately.
Nelson keeps pushing back at DNCNelson keeps pushing back at DNC.
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, Florida's highest ranking Democratic official, continues his aggressive public relations campaign against national party bureaucrats threatening to punish Florida for leapfrogging its presidential primary over other states. In a column in today's USA Today, he writes, "And it's ironic, because this year, after heartbreaking losses in 2000 and 2004, Democrats supposedly are united in their determination to win the presidency. That's hard to do when you tell 4 million Florida Democrats they don't count."
Some Democratic leaders are privately grumbling that the senator may be trying to help his colleague in the Senate, Hillary Clinton, who currently has the most to lose if Florida's primary doesn't count at the national convention. Nelson hasn't endorsed, but U.S. Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Alcee Hastings, who have also been outspoken, are Clinton supporters.
Nelson's column is billed as the newspaper's "opposing view" to its editorial supporting the national party's crackdown on rogue states like Florida.
Here is a part of the editorial that really set Nelson off, and caused his reply above.
"Finally, some adult supervision is coming to the process of picking presidential nominees...Florida's argument essentially boils down to one frequently invoked by schoolyard bullies and self-important celebrities: We deserve to go to the head of the line, we're too important to obey the rules and we dare you to stop us."
The Miami Herald criticized the state party, and Nelson did not like it.
I had an email telling me to just leave the issue alone and let it work itself out. Since Florida blamed Dean and the DNC for losing their delegates, I vowed to speak up since I knew better. Only today did one Florida Democrat admit finally that they did not fight back.
Gelber admits they did not fight the GOP about the primary.And he couldn't just say it, he had to actually tell Dean to stop the circular firing squad...just about the same words in my email today from someone. And who started that circular firing squad, Dan?