Best solution is to subtract away all SUPERDELEGATES from both states, seat Florida pledged as voted and give the 57 to Obama and EDWARDS (who can then cast them free or do whatever he wants). Clinton should not get ANY of the UNCOMMITTED as they were clearly cast AGAINST her.

The fairest would be to allocate those 57 pledged delegates, to Clinton and Obama by the same ratio of their standing to one another in the average of the most recent Michigan statewide polls prior to the Jan. 15 primary.

Why the polls prior to illegal primary? Why not current polls? Oh, because they show Obama beating Hillary in Michigan, of course. Stupid question.

I say split MI 50/50 and seat FL as is. Fuck it. Obama still wins and Clinton is out of excuses.

Just seat them as voted Obama.

The super delegates aren't going to be spun into thinking anything. They've already decided. They're just waiting for every vote to happen so they don't appear to be pushing her out.

They certainly aren't going to be spun by Obama giving Clinton whatever she thinks she needs to be able to say she pursued every avenue of victory and lost anyway.

In fact, I'd be more concerned that any compromise that doesn't give Clinton the largest margin of benefit would be seen by her supporters as proof that it was stolen from her. He's going to beat her anyway. I imagine they'd rather be making this decision after PR just to remove any uncertainty, but I'd still give her every latitude here just to prove she lost.

For those who might be interested, here's a link to the live blog done by the El Paso Times for Obama's appearance in Las Cruces earlier today:

http://elpasotimes.typepad.com/best/

I agree with the Obama people not to give Hillary her way to shut her up. I don't want her to be able to have any more delegates than necessary. I wouldn't trust her or the superdelegates, and would not want the margin closer than it has to be.

The people who should be working hardest to solve this, The Michigan Democrats who pushed for an early vote, seem to be largely silent.

Senator Levin Rep. Dingell, Gov. Granholm et al, need to admit that they made a mistake and come up with an equitable solution, that won't punish Obama, for removing his name from the ballot. Since they have endorsed Hillary, they could fix this by refusing to go along with any unreasonable demands she might be making.

One sticking point, is that it's impossible to know what sort of numbers Edwards, Richardson and Biden would gotten, and whether they would have cut into Hillary's votes, or Obamas.

Splitting the Michigan delegation 51- 49, in favor of Clinton is my personal fave. Because the election was Soviet style to begin with, the solution may as well be arbitrary but reasonably fair, too.

No candidate should benefit or be punished for the actions of the Michigan Democratic Party or the DNC. The best solution that accomplishes this goal and seating a delegation from Michigan is to split the pledged delegates 50/50 and reduce the number of super delegates to 50% of the original.

Let Hillary Clinton seat the delegates the way she wants too. That way when she loses she can't blame anyone but herself.

According to the Detroit News, Michigan's Super Dels have come up with a compromise, but Hillary has rejected it.
.....

..."Ickes also said the campaign opposes awarding Michigan's 55 uncommitted delegates to Obama. Most proposals to end the dispute would give Obama the uncommitted delegates -- even though he voluntarily took his name off the Jan. 15 ballot.
That's an unlikely scenario. Members of the rules panel have suggested the states must face some penalty for holding early contests. Thursday, New York Gov. David Paterson, a Clinton supporter, called her Michigan-Florida fight "a little desperation" and said she should not seek to reverse the party's decision to penalize the states.

Despite the tough talk, Michigan Democrats continue to communicate with both campaigns and rules committee members. They still hope the panel will accept Michigan's compromise proposal: Seat all the state's delegates, but award the uncommitted delegates to Obama and shift some delegates from Clinton to Obama, as a way of recognizing that he was not on the ballot here. Florida has proposed seating its delegates but giving each a half-vote.

Obama's campaign has signaled a willingness to seat the delegates and made positive comments about both states' proposals. Wolfson seized on those olive branches Thursday to make Clinton's case.

"The Rubicon has been crossed by the Obama campaign," he said. "They now believe the status quo is untenable."

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080523/POLITICS01/805230380/1022/POLITICS

At some point, Lanny Davis may open his mouth without provoking me to vehemently suggest that he should go perform an anatomically impossible reproductive act upon himself. So far, however, it hasn't happened.

Greg -- You have completely missed the insanity of Lanny Davis's proposal. Let me break it down:

Total Michigan Delegates: 128

Davis wants to give Clinton 73 of those delegates on the basis of the renegade MI primary vote.

This leaves 57 left to be allocated.

Of those 57 he wants to allocate them according to a pre-Jan 15 poll. Even if you split the remaining 57 delegates 50/50 Davis's proposal is nothing short of highway robbery.

If Davis got his way then Clinton would come out of Michigan with around 100 delegates and Obama would have around 30.

In short, he'd convert a 55-45% vote for Clinton into a 75-25% Clinton delegate advantage.

Fuck her. The deal should be this: Seat them according to the primary vote AFTER she withdraws from the race. Let her save face on this once she accepts the reality that she lost and stops dropping hints that something bad might happen to Obama. Let her show she can be a team player and THEN give her what she wants.

OT, but I just couldn't resist -- Greg, you sure are a QT Pie! (blush)

My "suggestion" for Lanny is that he take the agreement Hillary signed regarding the invalidation of FL/MI primaries,staple it to his current proposal, and shove it up his lying,hypocritical,soon to be irrelevant, ass.

The main thing is to prevent Hillary from taking this to the floor of the convention.

If that means giving her a "victory", MI and FL, that's OK, as long as she wraps it up after the June 3, primaries.

Thanks for playing Lanny, we'll give you a home version of the game.

How magnanimous of Lanny/Hillary to take -- in addition to the full 60% of votes that went to her in a unauthorized election in which she was the only serious candidate on the ballot; that she repeatedly agreed "wasn't going to count for anything"; and in which her lesser-known opponent was prohibited from campaigning -- only half of the 40% of Michigan voters who went out of their way to vote against her!

Enough to make a sophist blush.

Is there a Hillary supporter on the line who honestly thinks this is plausible?

The DNC simply needs to rescind its action as wrong-headed and ill-advised and stupid and undemocratic. If they want to impose a penalty, then they should think intelligently to come up with some other measure that does not infringe on the fundamental right to vote. It is a civil rights issue to disenfranchise voters in selecting a presidential nominee.

The FL votes should count as cast. None of the MI votes should go to Obama because he voluntarily took his name off the ballot and he blocked attempts at a revote. This means he should accept the consequences of his ruthless conduct.

damn tags.

and validating a practice of shifting election rules after the fact in response to political pressure -- is not an unalloyed victory for the franchise.

That is the part of this that bothers me the most.

I don't believe in rigidity, but rules have to have consequences if they are going to have any meaning at all.

With legal reasoning like this, I call upon Yale Law School to reject and denounce the J.D. it gave Lanny.

Much better than Lanny's proposal is the one I offered in an -- inexplicably! -- untrafficked TPM post last week:

Even if one wants to "count" the states, the results of the two unsanctioned contests that occurred in January are clearly not reliable indices of public support for the candidates. The results are, in fact, highly unreliable, because the candidates didn't campaign in the states and because many voters doubtless relied upon the fact that, at the time the elections were held, the DNC's rules made the elections meaningless. The results are also particularly unfair to Obama, who was disadvantaged as the challenger by abiding by the mutual agreement not to campaign in the two states. To use the results of the two unsanctioned contests as if they reflected real elections is not a legitimate means of "enfranchising" the two states -- scarcely better than arbitrarily assigning them random election results would be.

The challenge is to award delegates based upon an estimate, as accurate as possible, of the result that would obtain in a fully contested race between Obama and Clinton in Florida and Michigan. Here is, in my view, the best and most feasible way to do that, using "baseball-style" arbitration (so named because it's the process for resolving certain salary disputes in Major League Baseball). It would work like this:

Have each campaign, Obama's and Hillary's submit number reflecting the percentage of votes each believes it would get in each state. Each campaign could support its claimed breakdown with evidence, such as polling data, results from nearby or demographically similar states, or any other relevant information.

Then, have a panel of non-aligned judges (say non-endorsing Democratic Senators; neutral political scientists, or the like) evaluate the competing estimates, and select, for each state, the more plausible virtual election result. Thus, say, if Obama's side predicted a 54-46 win for him in Michigan's and Clinton's side predicted a 55-45 win for her, the arbitration panel would decide which "offer" was more credible, and delegates would be based upon that breakdown. Having a neutral panel evaluate the bids -- standing ready to pick the offer that is more reasonable -- serves to discipline both sides, and prevent them from making offers that are too-self serving. Thus, Obama's side wouldn't claim a 70-30 victory in Michigan; or Clinton a 80-20 victory in Florida, because the arbitration panel would reject such extreme submissions in favor of a more likely one from the other side.

The full delegations from the two states would then be seated, with delegates pledged to the respective candidates based upon the percentages selected by the arbitration panel.

Obviously this is a funny way indeed to decide an election. But it is more fair, more feasible, and less out of sync with actual voter preferences than any other available procedure.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/subliminability/

Dangerous to propose a literally Solomonic solution given Hillary's "tough" approach to politics.

As someone who took the time to go out and vote "uncommitted," for a primary that I was told wouldn't even count, I have to say this proposal makes me want to vomit. They are feigning outrage over the voters of Michigan being "disenfranchised" and then they try to turn half of my vote (which would have gone to Obama) into a vote for Hillary.

There were Hillary supporters in Michigan claiming that Obama and Edwards supporters were waging a sabotage campaign, and a strong showing for uncommitted would be nothing more than sabotage for the Democratic party since it wouldn't count anyway. Here's an example:

Those same people who were trying to tell me that my uncommitted vote was sabotage are now saying that its a compromise if they split the uncommitted delegates. And they are acting like it's a civil rights struggle? What the hell is wrong with these people?? My brain hurts...

The calendar to me, looks like this:

May 31st - End of the "MI and FL are being disenfranchised!" argument

June 3rd - Hopefully double victory for Obama, ending the "momentum" argument (I don't really see how you can get momentum from winning one primary in a row, but that's been the argument).

No matter what happens with these delegates Hillary is not giving up. She will take this to the convention. I know this sounds defeatest but I think we've lost the GE.

Greg asks...
Who is going to agree to use polls as a means for determining actual electoral outcomes, and in turn call this democracy?

You can't, Obama and Edwards colluded in taking their name off the ballot. They get no votes. Neither. None.

I think the best solution was suggested in 1804 by Alexander hamilton and Aaron Burr.

Lanny Davis and Harold Ickes (who voted for the rules last summer which requires the delegates of Michigan and Florida to not count) should have a duel. Not with guns, but with microphones, to see which one sounds goofier.

Having played by the rules as defined by the Rules and Bylaws committee before the voting began, Obama should not, under any circumstances agree to anything which affords Clinton any semblance of a break.

Either FL and MI are seated -- but not voting -- or a 50-50 split, which renders their input null.

So what you're saying is that the desperate one is Obama, not Hillary, which is odd because he is the one ahead.