Here Comes the Flood Pt. 3: Florida & Michigan

I will attempt to cut through this whole Florida/Michigan re-vote thing as succinctly as possible.

Hillary Clinton only wants a re-vote because it's in her best interest to keep the campaign running as long as possible so she can do as much damage to Obama as possible in hope (ironic, yes?) that she can pull off a miracle at the convention. Her plan for a re-vote that disallows the vote of anyone who voted in the GOP primary does unjustly disqualify Democrats who voted in the Republican primary because it was the only place their vote was worth something.

Obama, on the other hand, will find reason to shoot down any plan, because it plays to Hillary's advantage, to his detriment, and it wastes a whole hell of a lot of campaign money that he could be using to fight John McCain. While his reasons to shoot down Clinton's proposal may be valid technically, his campaign isn't doing anything to come up with a better solution, and that's because at this point, he doesn't want those votes to count. For purely political reasons.

So Obama's people are claiming that Clinton's people are trying to disenfranchise Florida and Michigan voters, and Clinton's people are making the same claims about Obama's people, and it's all a load of crap, because the real people responsible for this are Howard Dean and the bureaucrats in the Florida and Michigan parties who moved their primaries up too far and were too stubborn to change it when faced with the consequences. There's no good reason to be bitching about it now, they had all the time they wanted to earlier. To borrow a sentence from David Weigel, who was observing one of Clinton's appeals, "My reaction was about 6 oz. and took on a greenish-grey milky color."

[Late Addition: Oh, and I almost forgot: if the Michigan and Florida delegates are seated, Hillary Clinton may net plenty of delegates, but her "magic number" jumps from 2,025 to about 2,207.)