I’m listening to NPR’s “Morning Edition” right now, and they were talking with Debbie Dingle (no, that’s not a made-up name), the wife of John Dingle and a mucky-muck in the Michigan Democratic party, and she just said that the Michigan decision to break the Democratic National Committee rules and have the primary sooner was an act of civil disobedience in protest of a broken system. WTF?! The party bosses in Michigan decide to disenfranchise millions of people because they don’t like the primary system? Even though if they had left things just the way they were, Michigan and Florida would both be hugely relevant right now?!?!
I agree with almost everything Mark is saying right here, and I agree with what I heard Howard Dean saying on the Sunday morning talk shows: changing the rules now is going to give the advantage to one candidate or the other. Senator Carl Levin is apparently talking about/floating a mail ballot system; I’m not sure who would come out on top of that one. And apparently the wisdom out there right now is that neither Michigan nor Florida is going to be enough to put Obama or Clinton over the top anyway.
But what I’d really like to hear someone in a position of power at the Michigan Democratic Party say– I don’t care if it’s Granholm, who is pretty much term-limited and Canadian-ized out of running for anything for the foreseeable future or Mrs. Dingle who isn’t elected to anything anyway– to admit that they screwed up and to apologize. We can argue that the primary system is screwed up and needs to be fixed, though, as a former Iowan, I personally can see the point of a place like Iowa or even New Hampshire going first. But the fact of the matter is these people took a gamble and they lost, and they ought to ‘fess up to that.