The Democrats are in a bit of a bind

When the Democrats decided to punish Florida and Michigan for holding their primaries early, I don't think too many people suspected that the joke would end up being on the Democrats themselves. Over the last few days, I've been reading some interesting analysis by VERY BIASED people on both the Obama and Clinton sides. One was an article in the Sunday Sacramento Bee, in which an opinion column from the Washington Post argued that Hillary really is in the front (but does so by including Florida and Michigan as "wins" for Hillary, even though the election was not sanctioned and no one BUT Hillary was on the ballot). Other arguments indicate that Michigan and Florida need to be "do overs", which is about the only way the Obama camp will accept the situation. In reality, three things can happen here:

1. Michigan and Florida are ignored because they broke primary rules. In my opinion, and only my opinion, this is what they should do because Michigan and Florida DID break the rules, KNOWING there would be consequences. The concern from the Democrat Party is that disenfranchising these two states might cause those two states to not contribute strongly in the main election. If so, that's just the way it should be. If Michigan and Florida want to be spoilers because they couldn't be deciders, then they really don't deserve to be of impact in the first place.

2. Count the votes for Hillary. This is just wrong on so many levels. The whole argument is one of the reasons why I really have a lot of disdain for Clinton these days. KNOWING that Michigan and Florida were supposed to be off limits, she's now arguing that she really won those states, even though Obama wasn't on the ballot because of the early primary problem. It's amazing this woman would go through this sort of behavior, muddying the entire party with her desire to be president.

3. A "do over". Well, this is what the Obama camp would want, especially if there are caucuses involved, because he does well in that atmosphere. But to be honest, he doesn't deserve a Florida and Michigan win either because Florida and Michigan really shouldn't be counted. They played with fire and got burn. They can't then decide to pretend the fire never happened after it burned down the fire department.

So, it will be interesting to see what will happen next. Clinton and Obama are doing a great job of destroying a party that really, really needs to be united to take on the Republicans. It's like they actually believe the Republicans are going to just sit this one out, instead of fight tooth and nail for the presidency under McCain. Without a united party, the Democrats may lose what could have been an easy victory. This is the same boat they found themselves in with Kerry, except they didn't even suspect the Republicans were going to hit them from all sides until it happened. Now that they know this is most likely going to happen, it seems sad that they're going to just sit back, destroy their own party and then let it all happen again.

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