Cleaning up Dean's big mess in FL - Tampa Bay Times Editorial [View All]

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Cleaning up Dean's big mess
A Times Editorial
Published February 8, 2008

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....

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.

http://www.sptimes.com/2008/02/08/Opinion/Cleaning_up_Dean_s_bi.shtml

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Love the line comparing the Florida Primary to 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."