The press is all abuzz with the alleged controversy about the Democrat “delegates” from FLorida and Michigan. If you’ve been under a rock since August of 2007 here is a quick summary:

The Democrat and Republican parties have rules about when you can hold primary/caucus events for presidential candidate nomination. Additionally they have consequences for breaking said rules. These were known in August of 2007. After August 2007 many states moved their dates. Florida and Michigan did and in the process broke the rules. As a result, the Democrat National Party has so far followed through on the rules: those two states don’t have a say.

Now, who did that? In each state the process was an act of their legislature (elected officials from both parties), then signed into law by the governor of the state. Now the Clinton campaign after agreeing in August to the rules and the consequences, want those “beauty contests” to matter. Big suprise, she’s behind Obama. But now we’ve got the Governors from Florida and Michigan saying that it isn’t fair, that they should get a do-over - but the DNC should pay for it.

Excuse me? Are these governors claiming they didn’t know the rules? Did these laws get passed without their knowledge? If so, given that would be a violation of the highest order, how did they allow it and why are they not pursuing that?

The politicians created this problem. They knew that the rules would mean their voters’ actions were ignored. So why did they do that? They thought they would get away with it, obviously! Clearly they either figured they’d get the rules changed after breaking them or that their votes wouldn’t matter anyway. Is either of those a positive view of those legislators and governors?

Ultimately the moving of the primaries was a decision based on money. These states wanted more money from campaigning in those states. That failed initially when the candidates all agreed to not campaign there (easy for them to do so since they knew at the time that the results would not count anyway) - no campaign means no money. Now they want the money that would result from a “do-over”, and on top of that they want other states to pay for their mistakes.

Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, none of the main stream press is pointing this out to the hypocritical governors of said states. But the reality of it is that these states’ legislatures and governors created this problem in full knowledge of the results and risks. They got caught with their hand in the empty cookie jar and want to blame someone else and have that person pay for it.

 And yes, I do believe we'd be seeing the same thing, or a tleast similar,  on the Republican side if it were a tight race there. Although the Republicans at least counted half the delegates  - we'd all be joking about which half. At least, SNL would be.

 I think this also shows additional hypocrisy a la 2000 Florida. The Democrats whine and complained about the rules in that election too despite veryone knowing the rules going in. Indeed I'd say the Democrat nomination process is far more convoluted than the electoral college mechanism even if it is similar.

 As I've told Libertarians: how you run your party is a microcosm of how you would run the government. It certainly has been that way for the Democrats and Republicans.