Mercury Rising 鳯女

Politics, life, and other things that matter

But That Was Then, This Is Now!

Posted by Phoenix Woman on April 27, 2008

The same people who (now that they work for Hillary) are sooooo in favor of MI and FL’s leaders not being punished for jumping the gun in 2008 sang a much different tune not so long ago:

We already had top Clinton supporter Harold Ickes, who voted to sanction Michigan at the DNC, then now complains about the sanctions he himself approved.

Now we have Terry McAuliffe himself, as DNC chairman, enforcing the very rules he now thinks should be broken.

Mark Nickolas digs out the relevant passages from Terry McAuliffe’s own book:

“I’m going outside the primary window,” [Michigan Sen. Carl Levin] told me definitively.

“If I allow you to do that, the whole system collapses,” I said. “We will have chaos. I let you make your case to the DNC, and we voted unanimously and you lost.”

He kept insisting that they were going to move up Michigan on their own, even though if they did that, they would lose half their delegates. By that point Carl and I were leaning toward each other over a table in the middle of the room, shouting and dropping the occasional expletive.

“You won’t deny us seats at the convention,” he said.

“Carl, take it to the bank,” I said. “They will not get a credential. The closest they’ll get to Boston will be watching it on television. I will not let you break this entire nominating process for one state. The rules are the rules. If you want to call my bluff, Carl, you go ahead and do it.”

We glared at each other some more, but there was nothing much left to say. I was holding all the cards and Levin knew it.

[Source: McAuliffe, Terry. What A Party!, p. 325.]


Now?

Terry McAuliffe: I’m saying they’ve already voted, let’s count the votes. I’m saying that the state parties in those states need to work with the national party and figure out how we count the votes that have already been voted.


Hypocrite.


My fave is Kagro X’s comment about how Carl Levin is such a Big Tough Guy when threatening Terry Mac and threatening to rip the party apart just to feed his ego, but meek and mild when confronting the Republican Bush, Mister Twenty-Five Percent.

Now Jake Tapper’s picked up the story, and added some extra details:

Senior strategist Harold Ickes as a DNC Rules Committee member in 2007 voted — along with the other 11 Clinton supporters on the 30-member committee — to strip Michigan and Florida of their delegates as punishment for disobeying the DNC primary calendar schedule.

Ickes now is a leader of the “count Michigan and Florida” rhetoric coming from the Clinton campaign, despite his previous position.

[…]

Clinton herself said, in October 2007, “It’s clear, this election they’re having is not going to count for anything.” She said she was keeping her name on the ballot (unlike her competitors) just so when it came time for the general election she could argue she had not ignored the state.

It wasn’t until Clinton lost the Iowa caucuses in January that she acted as if the Michigan contests had any meaning at all. As Tallahassee political journalist S.V. Dáte recently wrote in Slate, “Last summer and fall, when the DNC made these decisions, she had a lot more clout. She exercised none of it.”

As for Ickes and McAuliffe — they have exercised a great deal of clout. But it has been in the name of preserving order, even if that meant stripping recalcitrant state Democrats of their delegates.

As McAuliffe said then — “the rules are the rules.”

Why? “For the good of the party,” he wrote (then).


This rates being spammed to every Florida and Michigan media outlet.

UPDATE: Oooh, this is even better: In the 2000 primary season, Michigan broke the rules by trying to move up its primary — and both Gore and Bradley pulled their names from the Michigan primary ballot. Yet there was no grand scandal over this. Rather than pushing the DNC to seat delegates based on the results of their flawed and illegal 2000 primary (Uncommitted 71%, Lyndon LaRouche 29%), Michigan Democrats quickly scheduled an open caucus for March 11th, 2000 that sent a full slate of delegates to the convention. (h/t to Forbes and to jimbomoron, who is most definitely not a moron.)

2 Responses to “But That Was Then, This Is Now!”

  1. CMike said

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    He kept insisting that they were going to move up Michigan on their own, even though if they did that, they would lose half their delegates.
    ***************************

    What’s this about “they would lose half their delegates?” Don’t tell me some Obama supporter, with the initials D.B., came along and pressed for a ruling that Michigan would lose all of their delegates. That would be a case of one of the ones we’ve been waiting for practicing power politics in the manner of the vile Clintons…fortunately It’s OK If Your An Obamacan (IOKIYAO).

  2. Actually, the DNC Rules Committee — which has over a dozen Clinton backers on it, all of whom voted to punish Michigan — made that decision.

    Why did they up the penalty? My guess it was because the Michigan Democratic party leadership had been penalized to the tune of half their delegates in the past, yet was still unrepentant — they tried to pull the exact same stunt in 2000, only to see it flop when both Gore and Bradley, the only two viable choices, took their names off the ballot.

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