Caucuses in Florida and Michigan?

Nothing makes my blood boil more than the suggestion that the Democratic delegates in Florida and Michigan should ultimately be seated at the Convention in August.

On one hand, I'm sorry to see the Democrats in those states lose their voices at the Convention. The problem, though, is that nobody really complained about the decision at the time (only one exception crossed my radar) -- certainly the candidates didn't. So, now it seems unbelievably disingenuous to hear Hillary Clinton and her supporters now whining about voters being disenfranchised -- if this was a big problem, why did she agree, along with the other candidates, to disenfranchising those voters when the Democratic party set down their terms?

But lately, the news cycles have been filled with people suggesting that maybe the delegates should be seated. I have a couple of problems with that idea.

First and foremost, how do you decide which delegates to seat? In Michigan, Hillary Clinton was the only candidate on the ballot, so none of the supporters of the other campaigns even had the option to register their support in that primary. In Florida, the other candidates were on the ballot, but since Hillary was the only one who campaigned there, we have no way of knowing how the race would have turned out if there had been a real competition. People talk about the power of retail politics, but we'll never know how the campaigns might have swung the race if they had been in the states. It's obvious enough that the lack of any campaigning favored the candidate with the most famous name.

All of the candidates agreed to the conditions of the primaries in the two states. But it was only once Hillary claimed to have won the states that she started caring about the voters there. This does not say much about her credibility, or the value of her word. Do we really want that on the top of our ticket?

The same goes for the credibility of the DNC. They made a decision, now they should stick to it. To do otherwise hurts our reputation and punishes the candidates who took the party at its word.

The big failure here is with the state and national parties, who betrayed their voters by failing to properly negotiate over the timing of the primaries. They are the ones responsible for the fact that the voters in two states lost their voices in the process. I'm sorry the voters have been marginalized, but seating those delegates based on the results we already have in their states would not make things right -- it would only marginalize a different set of voters (those who would have registered a preference if they had the option to do so, after having seen the candidates at work in their states).

Anyway, now this issue is threatening to split the party (and for good reason). And the party, desperate to find a way around the conflict (which is seeming ever more inevitable now that Clinton and Obama are running neck and neck, so every delegate will be critical) is now suggesting a do-over in both states.

Unfortunately, while this may be the least awful solution to a bad situation, this wouldn't be all that fair either. You can count on the Clinton camp to cry foul if they don't win both do-overs (and for good reason). We would be replacing early primaries, which took place when just about everyone in the country still considered Clinton to be inevitable, with caucuses, which have proven to be a really good format for Obama, and they will take place long past South Carolina, which marked the beginning of the Obama surge.

I think (sadly) that the best solution might be to stick with the original decision. That is the one everyone agreed to.

Clearly, those who keep claiming that this is the most exciting primary season in most of our lifetimes are making an understatement. The twists and turns in this race are stranger than fiction.