Clinton: spit and sawdust

If the fight for the Democratic party's presidential nomination were a boxing match, Senator Hillary Clinton would be a punch-drunk pugilist throwing wild haymakers before the bell.

This week, Clinton fights the last three primaries of her flagging campaign to overtake Senator Barack Obama for the nomination: Puerto Rico votes on Sunday, and Montana and South Dakota go to the polls on Tuesday. 

But the largest potential prize remaining on the calendar will be divided up on Saturday, when the Rules and Bylaws Committee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) meets to decide what to do about the Michigan (128) and Florida (185) pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Anatomy of a fiasco

Followers of the latest US electoral fiasco will remember that the two states were originally penalised by the national Democratic and Republican parties for staging their primaries in January -- violating party rules.  The Republicans stripped the states of half of their convention delegates, while the Democrats opted for a harsher penalty and banned them all.  Initially, the move was strongly backed by the entire field of presidential candidates, who did not want to risk antagonising early voting small states such as Iowa and New Hampshire.

Clinton and her campaign staff were among the most vociferous defenders of the DNC's hard line on Michigan and Florida.  Clinton political strategist Harold Ickes, once said that the Bylaws Committee, where he is a member, "feels very strongly that the rules should be enforced". 

That was, of course, before Clinton failed to knock Obama out of the race by 'Super Tuesday' on February 5, upending the campaign's strategy.  Now that the Illinois senator has accumulated a delegate lead that is approaching 200, the only conceivable path to victory for Clinton involves full restoration of the Michigan and Florida delegates at Saturday's Bylaws Committee meeting. 

Clinton's rhetoric

It is not pretty viewing. Clinton has reversed her original position, and recently compared the party's electoral processes to:

• the Florida recount fiasco during the 2000 presidential election;
• those of Zimbabwe, where the ruling party has been accused of using murder and intimidation to depress turnout among the opposition during the upcoming second round of presidential voting; and
• the pre-Civil Rights era South, where various underhanded tactics were used to block or dissuade blacks from voting.

Therefore, a political circus involving heavy media coverage of protesters at the Bylaws Committee meeting is expected. Adding a piquant flavour to the events is the prospect of a Clinton victory in the Puerto Rico primary the next day, which will allow the campaign to claim 'victory' in the total primary popular vote (including Florida, discounting the problem of counting caucus votes in this manner, and ignoring the fact that Puerto Ricans officially resident on the island cannot actually vote in November).

Here come the lawyers…

Inevitably in the context of a US political brawl, lawyers are involved.  Unfortunately for Clinton, the DNC's legal team says that the Bylaws Committee lacks the power fully to restore the Michigan and Florida delegates. The most that can be done, according to counsel, is allowing their states to exercise half their voting power at the Democratic convention -- in-line with the Republicans' solution.

None of this spectacle helps Obama -- who remains the party's almost certain nominee, even if the DNC somehow reinstates all the Michigan and Florida delegates.  Clinton knows this -- and that any protest will need to be carefully confined to this Saturday's circus, if she ever wants another shot at the White House.  Expect her to make nice after the primary season finally ends, on Tuesday.