Will Dean Cost the Dems Florida?

[DeepModem Mom]

TIME: Will Dean Cost the Dems Florida?
By TIM PADGETT/MIAMI
Thursday, Mar. 20, 2008

....According to a poll conducted this week for various Florida media, almost a quarter of Florida Democrats say they'll be "less likely to support" the party's nominee if their state's delegates aren't seated at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August — and by seated they mean counted in the final tally to choose the presidential nominee. Florida has more than 4 million registered Democrats, but even just taking into account the 1.7 million Florida Democrats who voted in the January primary, that's still a potential alienation of some 400,000 votes, on a peninsula (and the nation's fourth largest state) that ended up deciding the 2000 presidential race by a mere 537 ballots. In addition, some state party leaders tell TIME they privately estimate the Dem dysfunction will cost them at least 1% of Florida's sizeable chunk of independent voters, who number more than 2 million, or almost a fifth of the state's electorate.

Then there's the question of all the prodigious Flori-dough. Prominent Florida Democratic donors and fundraisers are now threatening to withhold or seek the return of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars from the national party if at least some of the state's delegates are not reinstated....

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...the DNC's lack of foresight is astonishing, even more so now that Florida and Michigan have rejected the idea of costly and less than reliable primary revotes. After all, the Republican National Committee annulled only half of Florida's GOP delegates — a more measured ruling the DNC could have mirrored. And while Democratic rivals Obama and Hillary Clinton couldn't set foot in Florida in January, John McCain and his Republican competitors campaigned there and scored valuable face time with Florida independents, with McCain even winning the endorsement of the popular Crist. Despite all that, Florida Democrats campaigned with cardboard cutouts of Clinton and Obama and then turned out to vote in record numbers for the primary election, which was remarkably blooper-free by Sunshine State standards. All the while they were convinced that in the end the DNC would never shut out their delegates, especially with Clinton and Obama running neck-and-neck into the spring....

Dean and the DNC now look all but AWOL when it comes to resolving a mess they did so much to create, leaving it to the states to figure it out. Nor have (Florida's Republican Governor) Crist and the Florida legislature been much help after they were the ones who led the state into the primary rebellion in the first place. (In this week's poll, Florida Democrats lay equal blame on Dean and the Florida GOP.)

With any hope of a revote in either Florida or Michigan all but dead, the candidates themselves aren't helping to resolve the mess they too helped create by going along with the DNC. Clinton accepted the DNC ruling last year when she was the front-runner; but now, because she won the Florida and Michigan primaries but trails Obama in the delegate count, she's the earnest champion of voters like Bander. She backed the idea of revotes in Florida and Michigan; but this week rejected a compromise solution offered by Democratic state Senators in Florida that would take the GOP tack and reinstate half the delegates (giving Clinton 63 and Obama 42) and perhaps divide the other half equally between the two candidates or divvy them based on the popular vote that has so far been tallied nationally. Clinton insists instead that short of a full revote, all the Florida and Michigan delegates must be counted and seated as they stood in January.

The Florida compromise was also rejected by Obama, who didn't even put his name on the Michigan ballot in January. Otherwise, not surprisingly, he is keeping sheepishly quiet — and a bit unpresidential — about the whole thing, looking to many as if he is simply trying to run out the clock by raising objections to a proposed revote in Michigan.

Meanwhile, little if anything is being done to appease angry Florida Democrats — whose enthusiastic support the party will need if the Florida sun is going to shine on its candidate in the general election....

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1724374,00.html?xid=site-cnn-partner