Why Florida and Michigan are like the Subprime Mess

The Florida and Michigan train wreck created by the DNC is like the subprime mortgage mess. Lets compare. In the subprime mess, purportedly smart people on Wall Street made foolish assumptions that simply are not true. They assumed that home values would increase at an unsustainable rate forever. The result of this is assumption is that millions of people, many of whom knew they could not afford to repay their debts, will lose their homes and investment banks, investors, insurance companies, etc will lose more than a half a trillion dollars. Plus there is an incalculable cost to the economy of the credit market sclerosis.

In the Florida and Michigan mess, the DNC assumed that the primary race would be decided easily without Michigan and Florida. The result of this assumption is that Democrats are left with a Hobson's choice: alter the rules that all agreed to abide by mid stream to the potential benefit of Hillary or refuse to count the votes of 2.3 million voters. The consequence of this is likely a loss in November and, for those of us who care, a generation of a very very conservative dominated Supreme Court.

The Clinton campaign has figured out how to back the Obama campaign into a corner by exploiting the unfairness. It is trying to force the Obama campaign to argue implicitly that being fair to Obama is more important than being fair to 2.3 million voters.

What happens if the Clinton campaign succeeds? Florida's delegates are allocated to Clinton based on the results in the Florida primary. And Michigan - who knows, presumably Clinton believes she should get all of Michigan's delegates (this would be best for her and that is all that matters). Then, maybe she will have more pledged delegates than Obama. But, she still will not have enough delegates to win the nomination. I suppose then her campaign immediately will reverse course and argue that the Super Delegates should vote for the delegate leader. Cool huh?

But....then what? Half the primary voters are outraged. Already we see polls that 48% of the voters in this country hate Clinton so much they never would vote for her. How many Democratic votes can she, one of the most polarizing figures in American politics, afford to lose? It seems to me that the answer is close to none. So, in her efforts to win by ignoring the rules, what does she win? The right to run for President and lose.

What if after fighting to the wire and making disenfranchising Florida and Michigan Democrats her central argument, she loses the nomination because Obama has more pledged delegates? It seems likely the Democrats will lose Florida and Michigan in the general election. Can a Democratic candidate win the Presidency in 2008 without those two states? Its a long shot.

So like the subprime homeowner who loses his or her home because its value did not increase forever and the subprime mortgage company that goes out of business because it has no access to capital, the Democrats lose the Presidency and the Supreme Court for a generation because the DNC could not imagine a close primary race. Can we find a way to regulate the DNC so this never happens again. Or perhaps, like Bear Stearns, the DNC and the Democratic Party should go away by being absorbed into a new party.