Yes I'm goin' to Carolina in my mind

From Pollster.com:


Pass the alka seltzer, friend.

DNC inaction shouldn't penalize Michigan and Florida voters

I've read a lot of comments recently from people who think the voters of Florida and Michigan should just accept their fate, blame their state democratic party, and get over it. I disagree. The inequities of the state primary schedule is a storm that's been brewing for a long, long time. States have been trying to get a more fair and equitable primary schedule in place for decades, and the Democratic National Committee has chosen to ignore the issue.

In July of 2006, USA Today reported:

Mich., N.H. spar over primary schedule change

For decades, New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary has played an unusually influential role in choosing which presidential candidates win their parties' nomination.

Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan thinks it's time to change that. He wants to give other states — such as his own — an earlier voice in the presidential selection process.

Levin and others who favor change say small, largely white New Hampshire isn't representative enough of the Democratic Party or the nation as a whole to rate the enormous attention it gets from candidates. For example, blacks make up 12.3% of the nation's population but only 0.8% of New Hampshire's population, Census Bureau data show.

Levin's crusade, a source of deep irritation for New Hampshire Democrats, is gaining traction this year as the Democratic National Committee mulls a proposal to add a state caucus between Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucus in mid-January 2008 and the New Hampshire primary in late January.

Last May, the Washington Post had this quote:

"The parties have lost control of the calendar" said John Weaver, the chief strategist for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). "And not necessarily to the benefit of the American people."

And it's true. Why should certain states always be the ones that "matter"? Look at how much attention is payed to the voters of Iowa and Hampshire. I mean no disrespect to them, but do these states represent the diversity of the American people? Other states have cried out for attention from presidential candidates for years, but if the those states' primaries are not one of the first, what incentive do the candidates have to spend their precious time and money traveling across the country to spend time there?

This is an issue that Howard Dean and the DNC knew about. It is unconscionable that they now penalize the voters of Michigan and Florida for the national party's lack of action to fix a broken system. In 1998, the New York Times ran an editorial entitled "A Primary Political Problem," and closed with this statement:

[I]t is obvious that only a guarantee that all states will get a decent chance to influence the nominating process is going to end the present destructive trend.

But instead the trend continues ....

photo CNN

Let's solve this in classic American style: Let's have a Do-Over!

We all remember the do-over from our playground days, right? The ball goes out of bounds because of some strange anomaly of the blacktop -- nobody's fault -- so you do it over. Why not apply it to the primaries of Florida and Michigan? After all, shouldn't the voters in those states have their votes count just as much as yours and mine? It's not their fault the primaries didn't count.

I hope that by now the state Democratic leaders in those two states are sufficiently embarrassed that their attempts to become one of the first primaries in the nation has caused such chaos. The irony is that these two states may end of as the last primaries held, and may actually be the most important ones. There are a total of 367 delegates up for grabs between these two states. Winning all of these delegates still wouldn't total the 2,025 delegates required to secure the nomination, but it would make either one of them awfully close ....