Democrats Come Together To Tear Their Party in Half
By Dana Milbank
Sunday, June 1, 2008; A01
Leave it to the Democrats to make a hash of democracy. When the Democratic Party's Rules and Bylaws Committee met at the Marriott in Woodley Park yesterday to decide what to do with the contested primary results in Florida and Michigan, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean kicked off the session by suggesting they avoid a "food fight."
Good luck with that....
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"I'm reminded," said witness Jim Blanchard, the former governor of Michigan, "of the old Will Rogers adage, which was: 'I belong to no organized party. I'm a Democrat.'"...
The lack of decorum in the hall was barely elevated from that on the sidewalk outside the hotel, where several hundred Hillary Clinton supporters chanted "Count every vote!" and waved signs announcing "Count my vote or count me out." A smaller number of Barack Obama supporters kept their distance. One woman, passing by a 4-year-old girl and her mother carrying pro-Clinton signs, shouted at them: "Cheater!"
The chaos and vitriol seemed to confirm Democrats' fears that they might blow an election that should otherwise be an easy victory for them. Nor did the compromise fit well with the Democrats' oft-voiced commitment to voting rights. They decided they would give Florida and Michigan half of their voting rights -- one of the more arbitrary compromises since the 1787 decision that a slave should count as three-fifths of a person -- and voted to award Obama 59 Michigan delegates, each with half a vote, even though his name wasn't even on the ballot in the state....
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Over disruptive cheering, the committee voted 15 to 12 against a proposal to give Florida full voting representation. Clinton supporters in the audience erupted in a chant of "Denver! Denver!" -- a threat to take the fight to the convention in August. That was followed by a unanimous vote to give Florida half of its voting rights. The audience again erupted in heckling. "Lipstick on a pig!" somebody shouted. "Please conduct yourselves like proper men and women," committee member Alice Huffman suggested.
Not a chance. The panel went on, by a vote of 19 to 8, to give Michigan half of its votes -- and to give Obama the gift of delegates that the voters of the state had not given him. Ickes was enraged. "I am stunned that we have the gall and the chutzpah to substitute our judgment for 600,000 voters," he told his peers. "Was the process flawed? You bet your ass that it was flawed. . . . You bet your ass a lot of people didn't vote." Ickes accused the committee of "hijacking" delegates -- "not a good way to start down the path of party unity."
In the anarchic audience, fists pumped and cheers broke out, requiring the committee to call for security to calm the ruckus.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/31/AR2008053102354_pf.html