Potemkin Village

Sen. Obama should start calling for Florida and Michigan to be counted. Here’s why:

Right now, Hillary is able to take the stance of the “fighter” for the rights of the Florida and Michigan voters. And there is no argument as to whether or not the FL/MI voters’ were infringed upon, the state legislatures made some horrible decisions and one might even call it conspiratorial. Remember, the Republican controlled legislature in Florida (headed by none other than McCain’s most likely veep, Gov. Charlie Crist) were the ones who ultimately decided to move Florida’s primary to Jan. 29th. If Sen. Obama does not start taking the stance that FL and MI voters were disenfranchised and misrepresented, and calling for their votes to be counted – he will face serious hurdles in winning both states in November.

Unfortunately, there are some problems if Sen. Obama does call for the counting of said votes: Even if Florida and Michigan are counted to the fullest according to the results of their January primaries, Obama still maintains a solid pledged delegate lead, but Sen. Clinton will gain a 26,000 vote lead in the popular vote. This gives her case to superdelegates much more credence – she is the leader of the popular vote, and the entire concept of proportional delegation is unconstitutional. However, this very slim lead (there have been over 33,000,000 votes cast in the primary) is entirely dependent on Sen. Obama receiving none of the “Uncommitted” votes from Michigan. It is unrealistic to assume that not one of those 40.07% of 594,398 votes cast in Michigan is for Sen. Obama. But since there is no appreciable measurement of appropriating votes towards the candidate said voters had in mind when they voted “Uncommitted”, allocating even so much as one of those votes to Obama will be decried by Sen. Clinton as “unconstitutional” and “disenfranchisement”. If said delegates are kept “Uncommitted”, this would free up the “Uncommitted” delegates to vote for whomever they wish, which frankly would allow the Clinton campaign to do everything in their power (money, influence – they have a lot of it) to get these delegates to vote for Sen. Clinton at the convention.

The issue is obviously extremely complex, and one can only hope that the Rules & Bylaws Committee makes a wise decision that is satisfactory to both campaigns (that’s a stretch) on May 31st.

UPDATE: Sure enough, Politico’s Avi Zenilman is reporting that Harold Ickes wants the Michigan delegates that were not allocated to Mrs. Clinton to stay “Uncommitted”.