Much Ado About Nothing

So the Rules and Bylaws committee has said that delegates from Florida and Michigan would be counted as a half vote for each delegate, including Supers.  Of course this was expected and a reasonable and appropriate response.  So why did it take so long?  And why is there seemingly so much anger over the ruling from certain parts of the party?

For sure the people most to blame are the DNC themselves.  Long before Florida and Michigan moved there elections up the standard automatic penalty in place was dividing the delegate totals in half.  But instead of following through on the rules in place the DNC decided to not only try and take away all the votes from these states, but also pressure the candidates to take their names off the ballots in Michigan.  Let’s be clear the DNC created this mess and though it looks like they made the right decision yesterday, certain heads should roll because of it. 

Yet there is some rancor over the 1/2 delegate rulings.  The first, why Supers are only being counted as 1/2 delegates, is easy enough to answer.  After all the flack the Democratic party has taken for the very existence of Super delegates, no way would they have given them more votes weight then the elected delegates in the home state.  It would be one of the worst PR moves ever, and I guess we can thank our lucky stars they found some common sense throughout this process.

The Michigan allocation is a little different though.  The Clinton Campaign is upset that the allocation of votes were determined as part of a compromise and not in accordance to the election results.  And as a theoretical political discussion I guess it merits some consideration.  But at the end of the day we are talking about a difference 5-10 votes, period. 

Without a flood of Super Delegates swinging into Clinton’’s favor, the election will most likely wrap up by the end of next week as Obama gets the new magic number of 2117.   Currently he is 65 delegates away.