Yesterday I offered some of my thoughts on the meaninglessness of last night's Democratic vote in Florida. Today Ezra weighs in, and as is so often the case, I agree with everything he said:
In comments, many of you asked how I could be so dismissive of Floridians who voted for Hillary Clinton. And the answer is, I'm not. I didn't keep their vote from counting. Hillary Clinton did. When the Democratic National Committee decided to impose order on an out-of-control primary process by stripping Florida and Michigan of their delegates if they refused to return their primaries to their original dates, there were three individuals who could have restored the franchise to those states. Howard Dean, the Chairman of the DNC, could have changed his mind, or changed his proposed penalty. Even in the face of his intransigence, however, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama could have simply refused his entreaty to avoid the offending states. A declaration by either that they disagreed with the DNC's decision and would instruct their delegates to alter the rules at the convention and seat Florida and Michigan would have forced all the other candidates to do the same, and the DNC's prohibition would have collapsed. The voters in Florida and Michigan would have attended speeches, and seen ads, and hosted a debate, and been able to make an informed choice
That didn't happen. Clinton's campaign manager backing the DNC, said, "We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process, and we believe the DNC's rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role." So Florida and Michigan didn't get their primaries. They didn't get campaigns. They didn't have serious Get Out The Vote efforts. And now, they're being cynically used, the language of democracy revisited and dusted off in service of a power play for additional delegates. Where, rightly or wrongly, the campaigns agreed to deny them a primary, now Clinton's campaign, which in Michigan won because they were the only campaign on the ballot and in Florida won because no one contested their lead, is demanding they be seated. The intervention did not come in time to give Florida and Michigan a full role in the democratic process, only in time to let the Clinton campaign benefit from their essential disenfranchisement.
That last line is key, and it tells you everything you need to know about the Hillary's approach to both campaigning and governance. She could have stood up and done something when it would have made a difference for other people. She did not. Instead, she waited to act until precisely the moment when it would help no one other than herself, cloaking her selfish behavior behind universalist language.
Once it twice you could write it off as an accident, but this is not an isolated incident. Its something that she and her husband have done time and time again throughout their career (and yes, I'm deliberately using that in the singular).
In 2004, Kerry got skewered for his flip-flopping, I was for it before I was against it nonsense. Kerry's sin was that he was a bumbler, a politician who couldn't pull of a U-turn without tripping over himself in the process. The Clintons, however, has no such problems. For them, the U-turn is just second nature. But that doesn't make it right.
More:
As a longtime Californian who's cast many a meaningless vote, I sympathize with Florida and Michigan, both of whom deserved better than to fall victim to an ambitious state party clashing with a retrograde primary system. But these votes are only meaningful if they have rules, if all involved believe them to have been free and fair. In 2000, Florida's vote was not free, in 2008, their vote will be used such that it is not fair. This would be wrong if Barack Obama had done it, wrong if John Edwards or Bill Richardson or Dennis Kucinich did it. And it is wrong when the Clinton campaign does it. If they believed democratic principles were at stake, then there was a time to stand for democracy and ensure Floridians would host a campaign and have a voice. They let that moment pass. And they did not do so passively; they spoke up in agreement with the DNC's decision. Now they are circling back for advantage, pretending to speak up for the process when in reality they are only advocating for themselves. That does not honor Florida and Michigan's participation. It cheapens it.
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