It’s a big weekend for Hillary Clinton’s potemkin village-like Presidential campaign.
There’s the Puerto Rico (Motto: We can’t vote in November, but our votes count anyway) Primary on Sunday.
And, today, the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee meets:
When Democratic Party leaders voted on Aug. 25, 2007, to sanction Florida Democrats for moving up the date of their presidential primary, no one anticipated that the decision would lead to a tense showdown that will help decide the outcome of the nomination battle between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Today, the 30 members of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee will hear challenges to that decision and a later ruling, which together barred delegations from Florida and Michigan from the national convention in Denver because those states violated the party’s rules governing the nomination process.
Democrats on and off the committee said yesterday that a compromise appears likely that would restore half of the delegations from each state, although the precise terms remained under discussion. “It’s clear something’s going to be worked out,” said Carol Fowler, the party chair in South Carolina and a member of the rules committee. Fowler is also an Obama supporter but was not speaking for the campaign.
Among the unresolved issues is how to allocate the delegates between the two candidates, particularly delegates from Michigan, where Clinton’s name was on the ballot in the Jan. 15 primary but Obama’s was not. There was growing talk yesterday that the committee could agree to split the state’s delegates evenly between Clinton and Obama, a blow to Clinton.
In determining the allocation of delegates from Florida, the committee appears likely to use the results of the state’s primary on Jan. 29.
As I noted earlier this week, it really doesn’t matter what the committee decides, because their decision will not have a significant impact on the delegate count and, more importantly, Hillary’s chances of winning will be as unlikely as they are today regardless of the outcome.
What will be interesting, though, is to see how the Clinton camp reacts to all this and whether, by this time next week, we’ll still have Hillary Clinton to kick around.
My guess is that she will not drop out after the last primaries on Tuesday and this will go on for awhile.
