In the end, the Clinton camp was undercut by its own supporters and by the state parties it purported to defend.
Yesterday's Rules Committee meeting began with Florida's state party essentially conceding that its delegation should be seated only at 50 percent strength. The pro-Obama committee members responded by backing the apportionment of the half-strength delegation precisely along the lines of the primary vote. In the end, the Clinton delegates supported the compromise; Clinton supporter Alice Huffman, a longtime protégé and ally of California's legendary onetime Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, told the Clinton diehards, as Willie had told his own troops on countless occasions, to suck it up and move on -- to Michigan, where they would stand and fight and yell and threaten.
But Michigan -- poor inept Michigan, which scheduled itself outside the party-designated window and has been scrambling for a way back in, running an election with Hillary Clinton's name on the ballot but not Barack Obama's -- refused to play Clinton's game. Instead, state party leaders came together at the last minute behind a compromise resolution that split the numerical difference between the Clinton and Obama campaigns' proposals on how to apportion the delegates. Rather than award Clinton 73 delegates and Obama 55, as the Clintonites proposed, or split the delegation down the middle, 64-46, as the Obamanians advocated, the party put forth a 69-59 division of delegates.
Harold Ickes, who represented the Clinton campaign with the same savage indignation he has displayed on behalf of far better causes over his long career, insisted that what he termed the "hijacking" of four Clinton delegates violated the party's fundamental commitment to a fair representation of the popular vote in the delegate count. He complained that the compromise reassigned the state's uncommitted delegates to Obama. But Mark Brewer, head of the Michigan Party and also a member of the Rules Committee, testified that exit polling had shown that Michiganders who'd voted for uncommitted delegates overwhelmingly did so as the only way available to back Obama. And the state's senior senator, Carl Levin, answered Ickes' argument by telling him, "You're calling for a fair representation of a flawed primary. You can't say that this kind of ballot [that is, with one major candidate on it but not the other] should be reflected literally in the delegate apportionment."
"We're trying to keep our party together," Levin concluded. "Don't disunite our party!"
In the end, Levin's argument even convinced one-third of the 12 committee members who backed Clinton: Four broke ranks with the campaign to back the Michigan apportionment. The defectors were led by Don Fowler of South Carolina, a former Democratic National Chairman, who told his committee colleagues that the compromise was by no means his preferred solution, but that "in the best interests of the party, we should support this compromise."
(Why didn't the Obama forces accede to the same kind of division they had agreed to in Florida, since the number of delegates by which the compromise reduced Clinton's total was a measly four? First, because that would mean legitimizing a ballot on which Obama's name didn't even appear. Second, because acknowledging the legitimacy of Michigan would have given Clinton the right to add more than 300,000 votes to her popular vote total while Obama's total would be augmented by a flat zero. The compromise, by contrast, effectively counted uncommitted voters as Obama voters. That difference may affect the outcome of the national popular vote, for whatever symbolic importance that may be worth. The Clinton people insist it's worth plenty. Third, I can only guess that the Obama camp believed that the Clinton campaign would have come up with another issue to continue to fight on, were this one settled. Whether they're right in that belief, I have no way of knowing.)
After Fowler said his piece, Ickes, in a tone that made clear he viewed the compromise as just so much kumbaya crap, announced that Clinton had authorized him to tell the committee that her campaign might challenge this ruling before the convention's credentials committee. The practical effect of such a challenge would not be to overturn the Rules Committee's decision -- the Clintonistas will not have the votes to do that -- but to prolong the campaign, to threaten disruption in Denver, and to give Clinton leverage if she wants to pressure Obama to pick her as his running mate. No VP; No Peace.
By threatening to keep the campaign rolling into summer, though, Clinton isn't just running up against the Obama forces; she's taking on Newton's Third Law of Motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. There are few if any Clinton-uber-alles supporters among the 200 or so still undeclared superdelegates. Nothing would push them more firmly into Obama's camp than a Clinton attempt to prolong the agony of the Democrats' contest (which, if it were a Shakespearean play, would now be into Act VIII). Indeed, if Clinton presses on beyond next week, when Obama will surely win the number of delegates required for nomination, it won't be surprising if some of the superdelegates who back Clinton shift to Obama's column. By keeping her campaign going, Hillary Clinton can damage Barack Obama and herself. The only presidential candidate she can't damage is John McCain.
