Meanwhile,
Al Gore Resurfaces for the DSCC...(Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee)

http://tinyurl.com/3m4mvz

It's clear what the Clinton campaign wants out of tomorrow's DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee meeting:

Also on the conference call, the campaign repeated what it said it earlier in the week: that it wants the full Florida and Michigan delegations to be seated; that it wants them seated according to the January primary votes in each state; and that the "uncommitted" votes in Michigan can't be given to Obama -- they must remain uncommitted.

"We are hopeful and confident that after hearing all the arguments and hearing all the facts ... that all the delegates will be seated and all of them will have a full vote," Ickes said.

Greg Sargent clarifies Ickes's point:

Ickes' position is apparently not that these delegates never go to a candidate. It's that the Committee can't pick which candidate they go to -- at the Convention, the uncommitteds can support whomever they wish. Of course, under this scenario, they wouldn't count in Obama's column in the short term, while hers would count.

Does anyone really think Clinton will get what she wants? Not even Clinton supporter Lanny Davis appears to as he has proposed some alternate solutions for Michigan's delegates.

The fairest would be to allocate those 57 [uncommitted] pledged delegates, to Clinton and Obama by the same ratio of their standing to one another in the average of the most recent Michigan statewide polls prior to the Jan. 15 primary. Or perhaps one Solomonic compromise, more generous to Obama than to Clinton, would be to divide the remaining delegates approximately 50-50 between the two of them, 28-27 (giving Clinton the extra delegate since she led in all the latest statewide polls prior to Jan. 15).

Marc Ambinder seems to think the latter is the most likely scenario.

Based on reporting and some guesswork, here is one possible scenario... and note, the numbers aren;t exact, but they're approximately correct: Florida's delegation is restored in full. Each delegate gets a half of a vote; in this scenario, Hillary Clinton would pick up 62 votes and Barack Obama would pick up about 43 for a net gain of 19.

More later on the various FL/MI scenarios/behind the scenes machinations. I'm at the airport in between flights, on my way to Puerto Rico. Will be able to catch up and update later tonight.

As we learned yesterday from The AP, DNC lawyers have confirmed that the Rules & Bylaws Committee is not authorized to restore the full delegations of Florida and Michigan even if it were inclined to do so:

A Democratic Party rules committee has the authority to seat some delegates from Michigan and Florida but not fully restore the two states as Hillary Rodham Clinton wants, according to party lawyers.

Democratic National Committee rules require that the two states lose at least half of their convention delegates for holding elections too early, the party's legal experts wrote in a 38-page memo.

"Lose at least half" is a slightly different scenario than FL DNC member Jon Ausman suggested this week was the likely result of Saturday's meeting:

"I think we're moving toward half votes for everybody," DNC member Jon Ausman said of his appeal to be heard Saturday by the DNC's rules and bylaws committee. That would mean superdelegates would have the same vote as pledged delegates.

In other words, Florida Democrats would have the same say in the presidential nominee as Democrats in Guam, American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands.

Considering just Florida, it's interesting to look at the difference between these two scenarios: cutting the delegations in half vs. giving the full delegations half votes. As Chuck Todd points out, the distinction has real world implications:

As for the actual meeting itself, there's one more angle you ought to be aware of: a 50% cut and a halving of the delegates is not the same thing. For instance, if Florida delegates are seated in their entirety, but only have their vote counted as a .5, then Clinton will net approximately 19 delegates out of the state. But if the delegation is cut in half, that's done in every congressional district as well as statewide, then suddenly Clinton's advantage is only a net of six. That's right, the complicated nature of the DNC delegate selection process will be a good reminder to math majors everywhere that a 50% cut is not the same as a halving of an individual number.

Of course, whether Clinton nets 6, 19 or the full 38 FL delegates  she hopes to get out of Saturday's meeting, she still won't catch Obama in the overall delegate count. As DemConWatch's handy chart demonstrates, even with FL & MI fully counted, Obama still leads Clinton by more than 100. But then again, for Clinton, the Michigan/Florida crusade ceased to be about delegates a while ago.

In a possible preview of things to come on Saturday, The St. Petersburg Times is reporting that Florida DNC member Jon Ausman has revealed that the DNC is leaning toward giving Florida's delegates half votes at the convention (h/t TPM):

"I think we're moving toward half votes for everybody," DNC member Jon Ausman said of his appeal to be heard Saturday by the DNC's rules and bylaws committee. That would mean superdelegates would have the same vote as pledged delegates.

In other words, Florida Democrats would have the same say in the presidential nominee as Democrats in Guam, American Samoa and the US Virgin Islands.

Ausman, you may recall, is the author of one of the appeals being heard on Saturday. This is how Ben Smith described it in April:

Ausman's two-pronged appeal asked to reinstate all of Florida's 23 superdelegates, and to give Florida at least half of its pledged delegates back -- his reading of the rules dictates that stripping the superdelegates and reducing the number of pledged delegates by more than fifty percent is prohibited.

Many people have felt that this should have been the sanction levied against MI & FL from the beginning and Terry McCauliffe admitted on Hardball recently that if the DNC had merely stripped MI & FL of half of their delegates from the beginning, "we wouldn't be sitting here talking about Michigan and Florida today." But to the extent that it differs from the Clinton campaign's stated goal of a full seating of both delegations, one does wonder, assuming this is the best remedy Clinton can hope for out of the RBC meeting on Saturday, which I think it is, what her reaction to it will be. The upside for Hillary is that it would serve as an official ratification of January's primaries by the DNC, which by definition puts those popular votes in play. The downside is that it's, well, far short of what she's asked for, which from a practical standpoint means the delegate threshold Barack would need to cross to win the nomination is lower than the 2209 the Clinton campaign regularly touts, and hence more readily reachable.

Update [2008-5-28 3:47:58 by Todd Beeton]:Tommy Flanagan brings us news from The AP that we should not expect full restoration of the Michigan and Florida delegations out of Saturday's meeting. Ya don't say.

A Democratic Party rules committee has the authority to restore delegates from Michigan and Florida but not fully seat the two states at the convention as Hillary Rodham Clinton wants, according to a party analysis.

Party rules require that the two states lose at least half of their convention delegates for holding elections too early, Democratic National Committee lawyers wrote in a 38-page memo.

The memo was sent late Tuesday to the 30 members of the party's Rules and Bylaws Committee, which plans to meet Saturday to consider the fate of convention delegates from the two states. The party is considering plans to restore at least some of the delegates to make sure the two important general election battlegrounds will be included at the nominating convention in August.

I grew up in a little suburb in Michigan. Wedged between Detroit and Ann Arbor, Plymouth was and is still an enclave of wealthy, mostly white Americans, but this was contrasted by the remarkable diversity of African-Americans, Indians (the ones from Asia), and Muslim immigrants. At the age of 17, I moved out of my parents house and started my higher education at a private college in a major urban center in Florida.

When the DNC made its declaration that the delegates of Florida and Michigan would not be seated, I balked. I think most people balked; there was no conceivable way that a Democrat could take the White House without at least being competitive in these two states, and there is no better way to shoot yourself in the foot than to alienate voters. I laughed at the fact that the Democratic Party managed to slight the only two states I had ever lived in, and thusly, slighted almost every person that I've met in my lifetime. I thought that the American Democratic Party, of all the political parties in the world, would be the least likely to surrender the voting rights of its members over political moves made between bloated party bigwigs, and over a process that punishes the only people who had no say in it: the voters.

But I guess that was before the era of Barack Obama.

Is Jimmy Carter Letting Democratic Voters Down??
Posted on April 15, 2008 by GRL

On Monday (April 14) I caught a brief comment by Jimmy Carter about the Nepal elections on the BBC World Service. Carter, who was in Nepal to monitor the polling, said that whatever problems occurred had "paled" compared to the overall success of the vote. (Unfortunately, the audio report is no longer available.)

In a report issued on April 15 entitled Trip Report by Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter to Nepal: April 6-14, 2008, Carter wrote in great detail about all the efforts made to ensure a free and fair election.

   <We have maintained a staff of long-term election observers for more than fifteen months. They have visited all 75 districts and had an opportunity to become familiar with the entire nation and its various and conflicting political factions.</p>

   After our arrival from Atlanta, we joined Dr. John Hardman and began receiving extensive briefings from former U.S Ambassador Peter Burleigh, David Pottie, Darren Nance, Sarah Levit-Shore, and others. Most of our 60 international observers, from 21 nations, had been deployed to the more remote areas by helicopter, all-terrain vehicles, and by foot. My co-chairman was Dr. Surakiart Sathirathai, former deputy prime minister of Thailand, who was a key partner and essential to the mission's success. Our team was joined by international observers from the European Union, Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL), and by several thousand domestic observers. ...

   On election day we visited as many polling sites as possible in the valley that surrounds Kathmandu and found the election commission's procedures were being largely followed. There were long and separate lines of men and women in a celebratory mood, the total turnout being above 60 percent. Despite some problems, our observers throughout the nation found the same situation among a total of 400 sites visited. Ballot boxes were required to be delivered to 75 central locations for counting, and we observed a number of these procedures.>

Impressive, no?

   I'm sorry Clintonites, I really am, but the true position of Hillary Rodham Clinton's on the MI problem has come out and, to torture a simple phrase, It ain't good!!

   The MI and FL questions are difficult ones to answer, not b/c of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, not b/c of the DNC, but but b/c of the arrogance of the state party officials. It's too bad really, b/c I initially agreed with them, that the DNC idolizing NH and IA was ridiculous. That said, the rules were set and agreed to, hence they must be followed. FL and MI knew that, and thumbed their noses at the DNC anyway. They deserve their punishment....which now leads us to what that punishment will be.

The Obama inevitability campaign marches on with the latest Obama surrogate to suggest that Hillary Clinton, for the good of the party, should drop out. First Bill Richardson, while stopping short of calling for Hillary Clinton to drop out, said the following in his speech endorsing Barack Obama:

"It is time . . . for Democrats to stop fighting amongst ourselves and prepare for the tough fight we will have against John McCain in the fall,"

Yesterday, Obama supporter Chris Dodd said this about the ongoing primary contest:

I think it's very difficult to imagine how anyone can believe that Barack Obama can't be the nominee of the party. I think that's a foregone conclusion, in my view, at this juncture given where things are. But certainly over the next couple of weeks, as we get into April, it seems to me then that the national leadership of this party has to stand up and reach a conclusion.

And now today, Senator Patrick Leahy has taken it to its logical conclusion:

"There is no way that Senator Clinton is going to win enough delegates to get the nomination. She ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama. Now, obviously that's a decision that only she can make. Frankly I feel that she would have a tremendous career in the Senate."

Well, yeah, sure they want Hillary Clinton to drop out -- they support her opponent, so I'm a bit unmoved by their concern trolling about the death of the party if more Democrats vote in record numbers. Does anyone think that these folks would be calling on Hillary Clinton to drop out if there was a string of primaries or even one that it looked like Barack Obama would win  in the next 30 days? Of course not. In fact, I agree with Chuck Todd when he argues that Hillary Clinton's presence in this race is actually forcing Barack Obama to be a better candidate.

The party ought to lay off the calls for Clinton to drop out, at least for now, because her presence at worst is making Obama a better candidate. The Wright flare-up was the first true political crisis of Obama's national political career, which is remarkable given how close he is to being the Democratic nominee. Who knows when the Wright controversy would have circulated had the nomination been locked up.

Obama needed to prove he could handle a real media firestorm, something Clinton has done numerous times throughout her career. In fact, her political survival skills have been marketed as an asset by the campaign, something I think would have sold better in '04 when the party was looking for a tough survivor to put up against Bush. [...]

Still, Clinton should feel no hurry to get out. In fact, she is also making Obama a better candidate by forcing him to up his rhetoric on the economy and start working harder to woo these working class, white voters who appear to be eluding him in the Rust Belt states.

As we saw yesterday with the candidates' respective speeches on the economy, this primary race does not preclude running against McCain and as we also saw yesterday, if Clinton does choose to try to win by tearing Barack Obama down instead of making her own case to voters in a constructive way, the superdelegates, which hold the key to both candidates' paths to the nomination, will turn on her. But ultimately if Democrats who are concerned that Clinton will take this all the way to the convention really want to make sure this ends before July 1, as Howard Dean has now called for, they'll urge Barack Obama to back remedies for Michigan and Florida. The idea that Barack Obama can claim a clear win without two states that early in the process would have gone handily to Senator Clinton is absurd. This IS her rationale for taking this to the convention, so anyone who would like to avoid that eventuality should get behind an alternative for those states. Gov. Richardson? Sen. Dodd? Sen. Leahy?  

Sen. Obama?