Cleaning up Dean's big mess

Howard Dean and the rest of the small-minded party hacks at the Democratic National Committee created this debacle. They are the ones who insisted their petty rules made Florida's presidential primary meaningless. Now it turns out a close race between two quality candidates could make our delegates awfully important in deciding the party's nominee. So it's up to Dean to figure out a reasonable fix for a fiasco he created.

One option that would be fundamentally unfair: allocating Florida's delegates based on the Jan. 29 vote to enable Hillary Clinton to win the nomination. That would be like the Tampa Bay Buccaneers deciding after the regular season they wanted to count a win in a preseason game so they could make the playoffs.

It was a nice gesture by Clinton to promise - after the state's polls closed and she clearly had won the most delegates - to seat Florida's delegation at the national convention. Barack Obama, whom we recommended in the primary, should do the same. But this is a graceful way to unite the party only if the nomination already is decided and Florida's delegates would not change the outcome.

The stupidity of stripping Florida Democrats of all of their delegates because a Republican-controlled Legislature moved up the primary was clear for months. The Republicans worked out a reasonable solution. They cut the number of their Florida delegates in half, and their candidates came here and competed. The Democrats weren't so bright, and Clinton and Obama foolishly boycotted the state.

We were among the many voices who argued before the primary election that the national party should have made the primary votes of Florida Democrats count. We begged Clinton and Obama to campaign here. Dean and the candidates refused to listen and treated this state as if it were invisible. So no one can argue with a straight face that the votes the Democrats would not recognize on election day now should decide the Democratic nomination.

If the election had counted, Clinton and Obama would have campaigned here. Even more Democrats would have gone to the polls. The outcome might have been different, or the delegate count might have been closer. We will never know.

What we do know is Dean and the national party have made a spectacular mess that could affect who becomes the Democratic nominee and who wins the White House in November. They better come up with a fair way to clean it up.

[Last modified February 7, 2008, 22:21:00]