June 01, 2008	Sunday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 26, 1429

WASHINGTON: Democratic Party officials struggling with the question of what to do with delegates from Michigan and Florida are grappling with a more complicated issue: how to resolve an election when front-runner Obama was not even on the ballot.

The fate of Michigan’s 128 pledged delegates is a matter of fierce debate between the Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton campaigns ahead of Saturday’s decisive meeting of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws panel. Michigan’s Jan 15 primary was not recognised by the national party, so Obama and other candidates took their names off the ballot.

Clinton left her name on and won with 55 per cent of the vote to 40 per cent for “uncommitted”.

The rules committee is trying to figure out how to bring the key Midwest battleground state back into this summer’s nominating convention. Florida is in the same situation, but several Democratic officials and committee members interviewed said a consensus seems to be forming over how to divvy up the delegates.

Most committee members are intent on penalising the two states for holding their primaries in January, even though they were not supposed to vote until Feb 5 or later. Party rules call for stripping half the delegates of a state that violates regulations.

To recognise both states, committee members are getting behind a plan that would let all 368 delegates from the two states attend the convention, but each get just half a vote.

“I think it certainly makes sense to have happy delegates in attendance and the more the merrier,” said Alice Germond, a committee member who is not supporting either candidate. “How nice to have rousing crowds from Florida and Michigan!”

Germond said she has been trying to act as a neutral broker between backers of the two candidates on the 30-member committee. Thirteen are Hillary supporters, eight endorsed Obama and nine are undeclared.

Some have suggested a fair solution would be to give Obama the uncommitted delegates from Michigan, but the Clinton campaign maintains Obama should not get any of the state’s pledged delegates.

“That is as fundamental a rule as there is,” said Hillary adviser Harold Ickes, who also serves on the Rules Committee. “It is bedrock it is below bedrock of our party.”

An analysis written by Democratic National Committee lawyers seemed to back that position. “There is no specific authority whatsoever in the Delegate Selection Rules or the Call for the RBC to award delegate positions won by the uncommitted preference to a particular candidate or candidates,” said the analysis, sent to committee members Tuesday. But the letter also said that Michigan and Florida must be stripped of half their delegates for violating the rules, a blow to Clinton’s argument that they should be fully restored.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said getting no pledged delegates from Michigan is unacceptable to the campaign and, “I don’t think is a position that people find terribly reasonable.”

Plouffe has supported proposals to cut the Michigan delegation in half, and Democrats speaking on a condition of anonymity about closed-door negotiations said that is what the Obama campaign is pressing the committee to do.

The Hillary campaign said it will fight to get full seating of both delegations in accordance with the January primary. But her campaign may not have enough votes to prevail.

Full seating is “the ultimate best result for Senator Hillary”, said former DNC Chairman Don Fowler, a Clinton supporter on the Rules Committee. “I don’t know that everybody agrees that that is feasible or possible.”

The Clinton campaign also seemed to acknowledge that it’s unlikely that the delegations would be seated with full votes in a legal response to the DNC staff analysis. In it, the campaign said they oppose reducing the delegations by 50 per cent, but if it were to happen, they would prefer every delegate to be seated with half a vote. The other alternative would be to seat only half of the delegates from each state.Hilary strategist Tina Flournoy, also a member of the Rules Committee, said fully seating the delegations is a “touchstone” of what they would like to see come out of the committee.

Fowler said he agrees with the Hillary position that party rules don’t allow Obama to take pledged delegates from Michigan. “But if there’s a political will and there’s an agreement, you probably could find a way to make it work.”

If all the pledged delegates and super-delegates from Michigan and Florida were given half votes, with Florida seated according to the primary and Michigan split in half, Hillary would pick up 92 delegates to 70.5 for Obama, with 15 super-delegates yet to declare their support. Former candidate John Edwards, who dropped out of the race and endorsed Obama, would have 6.5 delegates from Florida.

The additions would change the threshold for a candidate to clinch the nomination from 2,026 delegates to 2,118. It would require Obama to get more super-delegates, but would be highly unlikely to stop him from clinching the nomination in the coming days.

As of Friday, Obama had 1,984 delegates to 1,782 for Hillary.

Not everyone on the committee is ready to observe either of the January elections.

David McDonald, an unaligned member from Washington state, said he’s not sure how to split the delegates between the two camps, but offered an idea of splitting them according to the ratio of delegates they got in the other 48 states.

Of course, that would result in more delegates for Obama.“I’m guessing that would not be popular with the Hillary folks,” McDonald said. “But at the moment I do care about whether it makes sense and is fair to the system as a whole.”—AP