Senator Barack Obama will almost certainly go on to win the Democratic nomination, and his chances against Senator McCain in November are excellent. He is a fine candidate and a worthy bearer of our party colors. But his nomination will forever carry the Michigan* Asterisk if the Democratic National Committee's bullying, insane, non-democratic, Soviet-style ruling on the Michigan delegation is allowed to defile his formal nomination in August.
In short, yesterday's bizarre committee decision to award votes where they did not exist in Michigan, to rely on the collective finger in the wind to concoct a false "compromise," to invent a split of Michigan delegates based on some phantom idea of how people may have voted if the party had not screwed up the primary simply reeks of illegitimacy. Indeed, the committee's decision spits in the face of the millions of voters who turned out in this historic primary election, and it disrespects the army of volunteers in both campaigns who contributed millions of hours of volunteer service on behalf of their candidates.
It also disqualifies Democrats from standing on the moral high ground of the 2000 abrogation of electoral intention, from crying "count all the votes," from excoriating the likes of Katherine Harris and Antonin Scalia. Yesterday in Washington, we became them.
This is not about Senator Clinton, who I have supported with enthusiasm these many months. Had the committee registered half votes for uncommitted delegates from Michigan along the lines of the original vote, most of them would almost certainly have migrated to support Senator Obama. The result would have been nearly the same, with perhaps a slight net gain for the Clinton campaign, but not enough to make any material dent in the delegate deficit. And indeed, the Florida decision appeared to me to be a wise and unified compromise - albeit one that was clearly a political defeat for Senator Clinton.
On the rabidly pro-Obama (and, some would say, viciously anti-Clinton) DailyKos blog yesterday, diarist Kagro X neatly summed up the ethical disaster that inventing results would bring:
...awarding any delegates at all directly to Obama - who wasn't on the ballot in Michigan (and we can debate the meaning and/or wisdom of that decision, too - would mean that the RBC can literally sit down and decide that the actual results of a primary are not to their liking, and that they'll decide the results instead. I don't think anybody really thinks that's democratic.
Yet they went ahead and did it anyway. Can you imagine the effects of this precedent? If you can conjure Leonid Brezhnev sitting in at a Kremlin committee table calmly adjusting the returns from, say, Belarus, then the specter of future "Democrats" engaging in a bit of electoral nip and tuck in New Jersey or Colorado or Wisconsin comes all too uneasily to mind.
The shadow of illegitimacy will now linger on this nomination. Senator Clinton may well take the Michigan appeal to the rules committee on the convention floor, and she will be well within her rights to do so. In my view, Senator Obama should join her challenge of this travesty - and place his name on the record as opposing invented votes and fake elections. If he does not, then is he all but endorsing future "adjustments" of the electoral results. Further, he would guarantee the indelibility of the Michigan* Asterisk on his nomination, on his presidency, and on his legacy - and on his beloved party as well.
* Denotes states where Democratic delegates will be awarded by a small group of party apparatchiks without regard to actual primary votes.
