Earlier today in an interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Hillary Clinton endorsed the Republican Party's decision to cut in half the voting power of the Florida delegation to the RNC.
Why should they have been cut in half? "Because it was a Republican decision" to change the primary date, she said.
The problem? Democrats also supported the decision. In fact, it passed the state senate by a 37-2 margin and it passed the state house by a 118-0 margin. Moreover, the state party leadership steadfastly stuck with the January 29 date even though they knew the DNC would not seat the Florida delegations.
Clinton herself supported the DNC's punishment when she signed a pledge to honor the DNC's rules. The key line in that pledge: "the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee will strip states of 100% of their delegates and super delegates to the DNC National Convention if they violate the nomination calendar."
And now, even though Clinton is conceding that the Republican Party was correct to penalize its delegation, she is refusing to agree to a compromise that would apply the same exact penalty to the Democratic delegation. The basis of her refusal is a demonstrably false claim.
And that of course leads us right back where we started: for Hillary Clinton, Florida has nothing to do with principle.
It's just another power play.
Update: I should also mention that the final resolution of this will have no impact on whether or not Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination. As Al Giordano makes clear, Barack has got it locked up, even if you count Michigan and Florida at full strength. It will, however, take longer, which means more distractions from Clinton.
More importantly, it weakens the ability of the DNC to control a nomination process that we can all agree is horribly deficient. If every state can do whatever they want whenever they want, we're never going to improve the process.
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