"One final word....Mrs. Clinton has instructed me to reserve her rights to take this to the credentials committee."-- Harold Ickes, Hillary Clinton Campaign representative, Washington, D.C., May 31, 2008
Saturday, the Democratic Party's Rules & Bylaws Committee (RBC), in a surreal act of political suicide, awarded Barack Obama 55 "uncommitted" delegates from the Michigan primary, even though he voluntarily removed his name from that ballot in a tactical move to curry favor with the voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.
As Ickes noted, "uncommitted" is a constitutionally recognized presidential status, the same as a named candidate, and therefore delegates earned by "uncommitted" cannot legally be reallocated to another candidate.
But the RBC didn't stop there. They also STOLE 4 delegates earned by Hillary Clinton in the Michigan primary, and transferred them to Barack Obama, as if punishing Clinton for winning an election that Obama boycotted.
Then the RBC had the audacity to call their ruling a "compromise" and cloak it in sugary calls for party "unity." Trying to shove unity down the throats of 18 million angry Democrats, a bit of a joke...Message to the RBC: See videotape of Harriet Christian from Manhattan, voter who was ejected from your meeting. That should give you a flavor of our reaction and a taste of what to expect in August, in Denver.
More from Ickes' closing statement on Michigan, which is already written into history:
"This is in the charter, this is not a bylaw..this is in the highest document of our party.. this is in the constitution of our party....fair reflection..you cannot take delegates from one candidate and give them to another..."~interrupted by raucous cheers~
"Finally...there's been a lot of talk about party unity...let's all come together, wrap our arms around each other...I submit to you, Ladies and Gentlemen, that hijacking 4 delegates.... is not a good way to start down the path of party unity."
In 1996, when Obama first ran for public office in Illinois, he employed a cut-throat gimmick of challenging petition signatures to knock long-time community activist Alice Palmer off the ballot for the state Senate. There is much more to the story, but the bottom line is that Palmer had been a mentor and supporter of Obama's before he steam-rolled over her in his eagerness to serve the public. Ms. Palmer, not surprisingly, campaigned for Hillary Clinton this year in Indiana.
Seems like the party elite and the hope-change candidate are clueless when it comes to "unity." But us regular folks have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done in Denver to unify the country.
Note on the Popular Vote: The silver lining for Clinton from the RBC's ruling is more like platinum: Now that the Michigan and Florida primaries have been "recognized," Clinton is justified in adding those votes to her popular vote total. At the end of the primaries on June 3rd, Clinton will be the official popular vote leader, even excluding Michigan. If memory serves me correctly, it wasn't so long ago that party officials such as Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and Donna Brazile were touting the popular vote as the appropriate metric for super delegates to certify the "will of the people."
Cross posted at TexasDarlin
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