Deal on Mich., Fla. delegates was emotion-charged affair
Clinton supporters disputed attempt at compromise
James Roosevelt, the Massachusetts healthcare executive who cochairs a key Democratic Party rules committee, knew he would be wading into an emotion-charged conflict on Saturday when the panel took up the contentious issue of the disputed Florida and Michigan delegates. But he was hopeful that a preliminary meeting over dinner the night before might set the right tone.
"We had drinks first," Roosevelt said with a laugh. "We thought it might help matters, but as it turned out, it didn't."
The group met informally Friday night for 6 1/2 hours in a meeting room at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., and on Saturday broke for a nearly three-hour late lunch in an attempt to work out the details of an agreement in private.
"Contrary to the fairly strident statements people made when they were in open meetings, the atmosphere was always cordial but that didn't mean people moved off their positions" in the private sessions, said Roosevelt, a Cambridge resident whose day job is chief executive of Tufts Health Plan.
Last year, the same committee voted to strip both states of all delegates as punishment for moving their primary dates up in the calendar in violation of party rules. Saturday's actions reinstated the delegates, but with half-votes each.
A deal emerged relatively easily on Florida, Roosevelt said, where Clinton won the Jan. 29 primary with all candidates' names on the ballot, though none campaigned there. She was awarded delegates in proportion to her 50-percent showing.
But Michigan's case was more vexing. Obama and some other candidates had pulled their names from the ballot for the Jan. 15 primary, in which Clinton won 55 percent of the vote to 40 percent for "uncommitted."
Roosevelt said the group took into account exit polling data and the fact that there were about 30,000 uncounted write-in ballots in dividing up the Michigan delegates between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for the party's national convention.
In the end, the Michigan Democratic Party, and a leading Clinton ally in the state, Governor Jennifer Granholm, as well as Senator Carl Levin, who is uncommitted, all agreed to the controversial 69-59 split of Michigan delegates, Roosevelt said, even as the Clinton presidential campaign continued to dispute the attempt at compromise. Clinton partisans attending the meeting at the Washington hotel booed and heckled frequently during the public, televised morning and evening sessions.
"The Michigan party plan we adopted was as close as we could get but not close enough for all of the Clinton people on the committee," Roosevelt said. The panel resolved the Florida issue with a unanimous vote, but the motion on Michigan passed by a 19-to-8 margin; Clinton supporters said the decision took four delegates away from Clinton and she should have gotten 73, not 69, reflecting her share of the actual vote.
Furthermore, the Clintonites argued that Obama should not get any delegates from Michigan because it was not logical to consider the 40 percent of voters who cast their ballots for "uncommitted" as having supported him.
"The difficulty was that there were names that were not on the ballot, and we were trying to get something that represented the view of the voters rather than just a technical vote for 'uncommitted,' when the view of the voters was for a particular candidate," Roosevelt said. He said he does not believe the nomination contest will hinge on the disputed four delegates and thinks a challenge of the decision is unlikely before the party's nominating convention in late August.
Roosevelt said the Obama camp's proposal for Michigan was for a 50-50 split, and, "it was pretty clear the votes were there for the 50-50 split on Michigan, but they did not push for that," Roosevelt said. "I believe that the supporters of Obama on the committee believed that if Senator Clinton netted delegates out of Michigan there was a possibility of resolving this on an amicable basis," Roosevelt said.
Some of Clinton's supporters on the committee went along with the compromise, but member Harold Ickes, who is also a Clinton campaign strategist, led a group that denounced the move. 