Attacking Donna isn't worth the effort, it takes the resources that is needed to PROMOTE Hillary. Not attack the party, it's delegates and everything else with it. That's how elections are foiled, as the chickens are running all over pecking, forgetting that the feed is exactly where it has always been.

Instead, she spent all her money on...well, no one's sure, but the news reports make it sound like it wasn't well spent.

Caucuses are designed to give the person with the most money and institutional support an advantage. Everyone thought that would be Clinton (including her), but oops, turns out Obama played a better strategy by getting his team on the ground in the caucus states way before and in much greater numbers than she did.

When I read  Eriposte's  explanation,  and  realized  that   Alaska  caucus  only  had  9,000 voters  present,   North Dakota  only  18,000 (Obama's wins, among others),  but  the  Nevada  caucus  pulled   120,000  (Clinton win),   it   finally  hit home  how  Obama's  small caucus  wins  can not  match  Clinton's  huge  base  state  wins  or  her  large  caucus  wins.  

Discouraging voters from even coming to the polls means a GOP win in many of our swing states -- and also can really cut short any coattails for Congressional races.

I keep hearing the "they won't vote McCain" mantra and wonder if that's coming from solid blue states?  They must not see the world as we do in states like mine -- the blue state closest to turning red in 2004.  And the "Midwestern nice" ethos is very operative here, where non-political-junkie types just stay home when it gets too messy in families and among friends, when it gets too hard to figure out who's right and who's wrong in internecine squabbles like this.  

This if Florida, folks. Remember 2000 and 2004?

If the Democrat party can't get their act together, that state will slowly bleed Red. It won't matter if Clinton or Obama is the nominee, they're see red and vote Red, instead.

I do think Obama has been trying to lean on Supers about how new and transformational he is and how all his bright young things will turn against them if they back Clinton.  But that will only go so far if Clinton starts winning again, particularly in big states.  If she holds her own in Wisconsin and sweeps March 4th, the race has very different optics.

And one thing the paper also noted was

There is a more sinister demographic fact that is causing a collective shudder to pass down the Democratic leadership. Mr Obama is consistently trailing Mrs Clinton among white voters and, in the South, white men.

The Clintons would not dare play such a card, even if they wanted to, particularly after the racially charged ructions of South Carolina last month.

Now, I agree that the Clintons won't play such a card, but I don't think they'll have to.  Super Delegates can read polling data.

Which is why parties cater to the ones that come to even the lackluster elections.

But  the media  and the Obama campaign were still playing  that   card  to   trash   the  Clintons.

Clearly, this also blindsided Clinton.  She completely missed the strategy underfoot.  But who would have known there was a grand strategy?  Brazil is clearly part of this.  And Howard Dean has been a disaster.  Why alienate two big states because of tiny Iowa and New Hampshire.  Iowa has gone Republican in the past..so why cater to them?  None of it makes sense.  Putting Ohio first makes sense..because of its demographics...

Hi all. Been lurking here for quite awhile, and figured I may as well put my two cents in for once! In the interests of full disclosure, I am an Edwards supporter who moved to HRC, but the following points flow from my being a lawyer rather than a partisan in this race.

As the issue of seating the MI and FL delegations becomes an increasingly larger one, some posters opposed to seating the delegates have raised the following argument based on the DNC rules (which have been quoted at length here and on other blogs): to wit, that the rules committee of the DNC had the "discretion" to apply the so-called nuclear option to FL and MI and exclude ALL of their delegates, rather than the 50% option discussed in the rules.  This "discretion" argument is correct as far as it goes, but it's only halfway to the correct conclusion, as discussed below.

To begin with, those who argue that the rules provide for this discretion by the rules committee of the DNC are correct; parsed correctly, the rules do NOT expressly or exclusively require the imposition of the 50%  penalty.  The committee may craft any remedy it deems suitable under the circumstances.  Again, however, the argument does not stop there, and any argument relying solely on the discretionary power of the rules committee will get you to the wrong conclusion, because that is the wrong issue.  The argument is NOT over whether the committee has such discretion, but rather over how that discretion was exercised.

 "Discretion" rules are common in many legal and quasi-legal contexts, whether state statutes, administrative regulations, association bylaws, party rules, etc.  For purposes of my argument, such "discretion" provisions are very common in court rules, i.e., those rules that determine the boundaries of a trial court's decision-making power. For example, a trial court has the "discretion" to admit or exclude evidence at trial based on the rules of evidence themselves and the decisional law interpreting those rules.  As long as the court observes the objective criteria set forth in that controlling law, and applies that criteria equally and fairly to both parties, the trial court can basically make any ruling or apply any remedy it sees fit without fear of being reversed on appeal.

This court-rule analogy is, I believe, useful in the MI/FL context.  In essence, the rules committee of the DNC was acting in a quasi-judicial capacity (i.e., acting like a trial court) in making its decision.  The committee considered the particular facts and arguments presented by FL and MI, applied the DNC rules that applied to those facts, and reached a decision; in this case, the rules committee relied on the "discretion" clause as authority for it's decision to exercise the nuclear option rather than any other remedy it had available.

Now, to extend the analogy, we have reached the appellate portion of the case. That is, those factions favoring the seating of the MI and FL delegates are now asking to have the decision of the rules committee re-examined, and either affirmed or reversed.  In essence, the credentials committee will be playing the role of the appellate court with respect to the rules committee.

So (and this is where those folks who make the unalloyed "discretion" argument go off the rails), the relevant question is what standard of review is applied to determine whether the lower court's decision should be affirmed or rejected? In law, where the trial court's decision below was rendered under a discretionary standard (such as in the evidence example above), the standard of review is the so-called "abuse of discretion" standard--in other words, assuming the trial court had the discretion to render the decision it reached, did it ABUSE that discretion?  If so, that decision must be reversed or modified in some way.

The rule of thumb for the "abuse of discretion" standard is quite simple: if the trial court reached its decision on an "arbitrary and capricious" basis (i.e., a basis not rooted in objective criteria fairly and equally applied to all the concerned parties), then the court "abused" its discretion, and the decision below is invalid.

With respect to the seating of the MI and FL delegates, the following facts cannot be reasonably disputed:

1.    FIVE states were in violation of the DNC rules for moving their primary/caucus to a date earlier than that provided for by said rules: IA, NH, SC, FL, and MI.

2.    The rules committee elected to penalize only TWO states out of those five.

3.    The basis for this decision (conspiracy theories aside), was to give primacy to the remaining three states based solely on tradition and political expediency, not by reference to the express written rules of the DNC (the objective "controlling law" in this case).

4.    In deciding upon a penalty, the rules committee elected to impose the most severe sanction possible, rather than the 50% penalty clearly favored, but not mandated, by the rules (and, by way of comparison, the penalty favored and actually imposed by the RNC with respect to its own "rogue" states).  Further, this sanction was imposed without consideration of less draconian penalties that may have preserved some degree of voter representation for those states at the convention.

Clearly, the rules committee could exercise "discretion" in deciding whether to exclude FL and MI delegates.  This point is not in contention.  The relevant question is whether the rules committee ABUSED that discretion.  Based on the undisputed facts set forth above, an objective observer would have to conclude that the committee abused its discretion in this instance.

First, the objective criteria for determining whether an infraction of the rules had been committed (i.e., a clearly established earliest date for holding primaries and cacuses) was NOT applied fairly and equally to all parties concerned.  Instead, the rules committee applied that criteria only to MI and FL, not to the other offending states.  This alone renders the decision of the rules committee "arbitrary and capricious" and therefore an abuse of the discretion provided for in the DNC rules.

Second, the nuclear option employed against MI and FL was not the least restrictive remedy available to the committee for penalizing those states.  In other words, the rules committee had several other remedies that would have worked equally well to penalize MI and FL (and one that was clearly favored in the rules, albeit not mandated).  For example, the committee could have simply stripped those states of superdelegates only, leaving the actual popular vote/pledged delegate count intact.  Instead, without stating any objective reason for doing so, the rules committee exercised the nuclear option, which deprived MI and FL of ALL representation at the convention. Looked at from a dispassionate, rules-based approach, this remedy was clearly arbitrary and capricious, and therefore an abuse of the committee's discretion.

Is  the  Obama    campaign   hiding him now?