I don't get what this is supposed to accomplish. If there is a snowball-like action with the primary (like in 2004) then it really doesn't matter whether Florida votes in the DNC if they can swing a bunch of state's primaries.

There's a fundamental problem with having states pay for, and control, something that should be a function of a private organization (a political party). It's part of the machinery of the self-propagating two-party system.

TAS makes a great point; Michiganders on Lane Hudson’s blog also point out the GOPs made the change there as well, although Lane responds that Democratic state Senators all voted for the change even though the state party opposed it.

This is a GOP attempt to divide our party, make our national committee irrelevant, and alienate Florida and Michigan Democrats from our nominee. Howard Dean needs to fix this. It’s a GOP power grab, and our internal arguments about it are exactly what they want.

So why does it sound like folks are blaming Howard Dean and requiring him to “fix this” when it is a problem created by power grabbing Republics? I do not understand.

1. Repugs control both Florida Legislature bodies.
2. Repug-controlled Florida Legislature says “Feck You!” to DNC primary rules.
3. Repug-controlled Florida Legislature knows that DNC primary rules “mandate” the loss of Florida Democratic Delegates.
4. Florida Dems get screwed by the Florida Repugs via the DNC.
5. Florida Dems are left with only their joysticks to play with.
And the winner in all this would be…Repugs?

A Democrat actually wrote the bill that moved the primary. Party chairman Howard Dean might swallow that if a Democratic state senator, Jeremy Ring, hadn’t sponsored the original bill moving the primary to Jan. 29. Besides, Dean knows he lobbied early on to get Democrats to back off the bill and folks like House Democratic leader Dan Gelber blew him off publicly.

Toward the end of the session Democratic lawmakers started to grasp the implications and pursued a token amendment to push the primary to Feb. 5, which, as expected, went nowhere.

Then they voted for the overall election reform bill, of course, because it included paper trails for voting machines. Florida Democrats steamrolled by Republicans? They could have been, but that’s not what happened.

I don’t know that I can offer a solution to this problem but it sure isn’t fair to have the same two states determine the course of every presidential primary.

Clinton (and Giuliani) expect Florida to rescue their campaigns from second and third place finishes in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. I wonder who those Florida and Michigan Democrats that backed these changes back for President?

Schwarzenegger questioned the timing. GOP candidates must have discovered that they aren’t making any headway here. But the responsible course is to reconsider their message, not to look for ways to blunt the state’s voting power.

Democrats, in response, are dusting off a proposal to circumvent the electoral college by committing all of California’s electors to the winner of the nationwide popular vote — but only if states representing a majority of electoral votes do likewise and thus render the electoral college moot. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is going a step further, calling for a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college.

Last one at 7:47 p.m.

So, at least we now know what the conservative Republican “moles” in the Democratic Leadership Council are trying to do to subvert chances of the Democratic Party taking back the White House and expanding Democratic control of Congress next year…divide and conquer…probably on orders of Karl Rove.

Why else do the more conservative DLC-selected Blue Dog Democrats keep siding with Republicans, if not to subvert any coordinated Democratic opposition to the worst and most corrupt Republican administration in recent memory?

Howard Dean and the DNC’s “fifty-state strategy” has temporarily impeded Republican plans for permanent (and evil) conservative Republican control of our democracy, but only impeded.

This Republican goal has not changed, and the DLC-selected Blue Dog Democrats (who have the same mindset as ultra-orthodox conservative Republicans concerning the issue of abortion) are co-conspirators in this coordinated Republican plot to destroy our democracy, and all of our freedoms, in an attempt to establish a permanent theocratic hell.

But maybe some of the DLC-selected Blue Dog Democrats will surprise me? Maybe some of them will side with truth, justice and the American way instead of throwing in their lot with some of the most devious and evil people to have ever assaulted our nation’s freedoms…from within?

Thus, this Floridian Democratic ploy, in which they totally trash previous agreements within the Democratic Party (the party of liberty and justice for all), reeks of a Republican Party plot, hatched, I believe, between the increasingly irrelevant DLC and Karl Rove’s political chop-shop.

August 25, 2007

AP

EXETER, N.H. --Presidential hopeful Bill Richardson appealed Saturday for an end to the one-upsmanship among states vying to hold the earliest Democratic party primary.

Speaking after a campaign stop at a home in Exeter, the New Mexico Democrat said he believes it is important that the leadoff roles of Iowa and New Hampshire "not be usurped."

Richardson was speaking after the national party said Florida Democrats would forfeit their votes in selecting a presidential nominee unless they delay their state election by at least a week. Saturday's warning by the DNC rules committee is intended to discourage others from leapfrogging ahead to earlier dates.

The Florida party has 30 days to submit an alternative to its planned Jan. 29 primary or lose its 210 delegates to the nominating convention in Denver next summer.

"As a candidate, I just want to get this settled and just appeal to all parties to get their act together and have some definitive roles," Richardson said. "Let's have an orderly process instead of states trying to outdo each other."

Richardson said he learned about the DNC tough stance on Florida after the Exeter event.

He joked last week that the states' scramble to hold the nation's first primary hasn't helped his "underdog campaign," saying that he needs as much time as he can get to compete against better-financed and better-recognized rivals.

Party rules say states cannot hold their 2008 primary contests before Feb. 5, except for Iowa on Jan. 14, Nevada on Jan. 19, New Hampshire on Jan. 22 and South Carolina on Jan. 29.

The calendar was designed to preserve the traditional role that Iowa and New Hampshire have played in selecting the nominee, while adding two states with more racial and geographic diversity to influential early slots.

Richardson answered questions from more than 100 people in a sweltering living room, saying the U.S. can and should withdraw its troops from Iraq within six months. He also called for the lowering of the Medicare age from 65 to 55 and cautioned against expanding the use of coal as a source of energy.

Third Parties Don't Work: Why and How Egalitarians Should Transform the Democratic Party by G William Domhoff (an excellent essay).

When some of the egalitarians of the past took a look at this frustrating situation, they decided the only way to alter it was to have a preliminary election for each party, which came to be called a primary. This system in effect allows leftists and liberals to duke it in out in one set of primaries, and moderate conservatives and ultraconservatives to go at it in the other set. Primaries were first instituted by reformers in Wisconsin in 1903, and then spread to the prairie states, where the northern European immigrants with socialist and radical farmer roots thought they were receiving a raw deal from corporations and big farmers. Primaries also came to be used in the South along about the same time by very different people for very different reasons -- they were a way to exclude African-Americans from power. These "white primaries," often operated under the fiction that they were merely a party function, were the final step in the disenfranchisement of African-Americans in the late nineteenth century. They were not banned by the Supreme Court until 1944.

The whole primary process is pretty bad everywhere, but the mechanics of voting (including primaries) in Florida are still pretty much those of the Old South. Dean did what he had to. They really need to clean up their act.

Who to blame - FL GOP or FL Dems? Well, as Garrison Keillor once said, "Yup, warm weather makes you stupid."