During most election cycles the above question is a no brainer. Candidates campaign around, someone becomes the clear favorite, and by the time the convention rolls around we have a nominee. However, this year is different. With Senators Obama and Clinton running a tight race, and the chance of no clear Democratic nominee by the time the convention rolls around, how is the donkey going to make their pick. Howard Dean has an idea:
WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean urged Florida and Michigan party officials to come up with plans to repeat their presidential nominating contests so that their delegates can be counted."All they have to do is come before us with rules that fit into what they agreed to a year and a half ago, and then they'll be seated," Dean said during a round of interviews Thursday on network and cable TV news programs.
The two state parties will have to find the funds to pay for new contests without help from the national party, Dean said.
"We can't afford to do that. That's not our problem. We need our money to win the presidential race," he said.
Officials in Michigan and Florida are showing renewed interest in holding repeat presidential nominating contests so that their votes will count in the epic Democratic campaign.
The Michigan governor, top officials in Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign, and Florida's state party chair all are now saying they would consider holding a sort of do-over contest by June. That's a change from the previous insistence from officials in both states that the primaries they held in January should determine how their delegates are allocated.
Clinton campaign communications director Howard Wolfson said in a conference call with reporters Thursday that it's hard to envision a scenario where the Florida and Michigan delegations are not seated at the conventions.
That would send a "very unsettling signal to the people of those states," Wolfson said.
Florida and Michigan screwed themselves out of delegates because they moved their state contests up months before they used to be held. This was done because normally a clear favorite emerges early, and thus having your primary early is, at the very least, a way to make your state relevant for a short period of time (Looking at your Iowa). In response to moving up their primaries, the DNC took away the delegates which more or less made the whole thing useless. Little did anyone know that the race for the Democratic nomination would take more than a week or two to figure out, and now the states that blew their load way too early are interested in a second chance.
Normally, I would argue that when you screw yourself you screw yourself, but the determining who wins the nomination is no small matter. Democrats in Florida and Michigan have a right to have their votes count, and now more than ever it appears that their votes will in fact matter.
The Democrats, on the federal, state, and local level, need to find a way for Michigan and Florida to hold primary contests again, so that whomever is the Democratic nominee will have done so in the fairest manner possible.
That said, me thinks that Hillary Clinton would win Florida and Michigan, so clearly this will benefit her more. It will be interesting to see if Obama is more interested in making sure the votes of the Democrats in the states of Florida and Michigan are more important to him (they should be) than the nomination, as I find it hard to believe Obama can make an argument against Florida and Michigan holding their primaries and not take a hit in the polls.
R
So there's this anti-Scientology group called "Anonymous", that has become a little famous for their 
