Legal Commentary

Lanny Davis Proposes Very Fair Florida-Michigan Solution

By Jeralyn

Here's the gist of Lanny Davis' eminently fair proposal for seating Florida and Michigan delegates.

In Michigan, Clinton received 55 percent of the vote. According to Thegreenpapers.com, she thus should receive 73 pledged delegates based on that percentage.

What about the 50 remaining uncommitted delegates, and 7 collectively cast for Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, who were also on the ballot? Some of those 50 delegates might have been for Clinton as a second choice to candidates other than Obama, so it would be totally unfair to award all 50 delegates to Obama....Obama was not forced by party rules to remove his name — he chose to do so.

The Rules Committee has several options. The fairest would be to allocate those 57 pledged delegates, to Clinton and Obama by the same ratio of their standing to one another in the average of the most recent Michigan statewide polls prior to the Jan. 15 primary. [More...]

Or perhaps one Solomonic compromise, more generous to Obama than to Clinton, would be to divide the remaining delegates approximately 50-50 between the two of them, 28-27 (giving Clinton the extra delegate since she led in all the latest statewide polls prior to Jan. 15).

Florida's compromise solution is even easier. Clinton won 50 percent of the vote, while Obama won 33 percent of the 1.7 million Democratic votes cast. According to Thegreenpapers.com, that would give Clinton 105 delegates and Obama 69 delegates. That leaves 11 elected John Edwards delegates yet to decide, as well as 13 still unpledged superdelegates. (Eight supers have already decided for Clinton and five have decided for Obama).

Lanny urges Obama to accept this solution. He ends with:

If more than 2.3 million Democrats in Michigan and Florida are told their votes didn't count even though their party leaders were willing to revote, that could anger them, to put it mildly. If they blame Obama for not supporting the revote while still blocking a fair solution by the Rules Committee, essentially not permitting their January votes to count, they are likely to be angrier still — if, that is, he is the Democratic Party's nominee. In a close election that could mean the difference between the Democratic candidate carrying or losing Michigan and Florida.

Is it worth risking the White House in November by not accepting this fair solution?

His final words echo what I wrote a few hours ago: The Supreme Court hangs in the balance.

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Full post as published by TalkLeft on May 26, 2008 (boomark / email).