The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel(Dennis)

Hillary Clinton needs to stop the disingenuous games. Michigan and Florida should not count unless there are new contests.

"Democracy!" comes the protest from Hillary. "We want the voters to decide!" War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Hillary Clinton wants a fair, democratic contest for the nomination. Let's go back to the beginning to put this current fight in its proper context.....

Do you know who spent more money than anyone else on their 2006 Senate race? There are many people who would be very good guesses. Robert Menendez was an incumbent in the very expensive NJ media market , fighting for his political life againt an attractive opponent, but it wasn't him. Nor was it Bob Casey, who ran against an established incubant in the large state of Pennsylvania. Nor was it Claire McCaskill, Jim Webb, Jon Tester or any other Democrat running in a close race trying to recapture the Senate for the Democrats.

No, it was Hillary Clinton who spent the most by far. She spent $37 million dollars in a campaign where she was never up by less than 20 points, and where she faced an opponent who was a token Republican who had no shot of winning. Some of that money could have been given to candidates in close races to help the party. But no, instead she chose to spend $37million dollars to show people that she could. She was attempting to build an American version of the palace of Versailles, to waste money and intimidate rivals into not even beginning their campaigns no matter how worthy they were. Her method was very Louis XIV, but her intent was more like Herod, that ancient monarch of Roman Palestine, who slaughtered infants so that a challenge to his power would not emerge when they grew strong enough to defend themselves.

And for a time it worked, Mark Warner and Evan Bayh two candidates with superior resumes than she dropped out of the race when it seemed that there was no way they could beat Hillary. Countless others did not even begin to consider to get into the race, because all of the big Democratic donors had been sucked into Hillary's orbit. This did not happen because she was the most skilled candidate; Jon Edwards, and Barack Obama are far better on the stump than she. Nor was it because she was the most experience; Richardson, Warner, Biden, and Dodd all have more experience. It was because her last name was Clinton, her husband was the former president, she was most likely to win, and those that didn't pledge to her (and now) would likely be left out of all the fun in the 2nd Clinton administration.

Hillary was doing her best to make sure voters didn't have a choice; if it were up to her she would have been carried on a gilded chariot to the convention hall in Denver, anointed with oil, and been proclaimed Queen Clinton II, lord of all she surveys.

But a funny thing happened on her way to the nomination. Barack Obama and, to a lesser extent, John Edwards got themselves funding and an organization with the few pieces of the Democratic Party left after the Clinton plunder. Barack Obama was successful in turning all the old institutions designed to anoint an insider favorite on their heads. Clinton controls the big city machines, that, along with her inheritance of votes from her husband, make her nearly unstoppable in large Blue states? Fine, the Obama campaign organized brilliantly and captured all the states where the Clintons had let the Democratic Party wither.

Now with their campaign in trouble, they attempt every tactic to win. They attempted to use race as a tactic to marginalize Obama. That didn't work. They attempted to position Hillary as the left wing candidate in the campaign despite her running to right for all of 2007. That didn't work either, so they turned to bashing Obama's supporters. African Americans were cast as boobs who would vote for the brownest person available, so their opinion didn't count. His enthusiastic young supporters were cast as part of a cult (it's telling that the Clinton campaign cannot even imagine that anyone could be so enthusiastic about a political campaign). And now, in what will hopefully be the last distortion in her shameless campaign, she sheds crocodile tears for "delegates" she won by going back on deals she made before the start of the race.

Her aim, of course, is not to win the race for pledged delegates, the 90 delegate advantage she would get from Michigan (where Obama was not even on the ballot )and Florida (where she had surrogates rally support and pandered to the public by all of a sudden disagreeing with the Democratic Party on whether their delegates should count) would not be enough to bring her within striking distance of Obama in that catagory. No, she wants to bring the pledged delegate race as close as possible so her endgame of arm twisting Democratic officials into finally placing the crown on her head in the end, as she tried to do in the beginning, will have the best chance of working. This is why her campaign has begun to call Super Delegates "Automatic Delegates."

Allowing Michigan and Florida to count would not only be unfair, for all the usual reasons, but would buy into the anti-democratic strategy Clinton has waged from the beginning. That should be reason enough to reject it.

But there is one final reason. If you even want the party to be able to reform the delegate selection process for the primaries, you have to accept the party having the ability to refuse entrance for states that violated the process. Otherwise, this system will be total anarchy where each state gets to decide for itself where and how it will allocate delegates, with no ability for the national party to discipline it. If Illinois decided to make their primary "winner take all" would disallowing the Illinois delegates be "disenfranchising" Illinois voters?

Florida and Michigan bet that the could gain a greater voice in the process by breaking the rules that all other states followed. They lost that bet, and they should not now be rewarded for their dishonesty.