The irony would be delicious if it weren’t so shameful.
Eight years ago, Democrats worked themselves into a fury over the supposed “disenfranchisement” of Florida voters. There was near-hysteria over the need to count every single Florida vote — and indeed, to recount every single Florida vote in counties where it suited the party.
Democrats questioned the “fundamental fairness” of our political system when the party’s insistence on selective recounting went before a coterie of enigmatic power brokers in Washington.
It was scandal! Undemocratic! Backroom dealing! And when the Supreme Court ultimately “handed,” as Democrats put it, a Florida victory to George W. Bush, the air was thick with accusations of crookedness and cronyism. To this day, you see bumper stickers from ’04 with the slogan “Let’s Not Elect Bush This Time, Either.”
The innocent voters of Florida had been robbed, ladies and gentlemen. They had been tricked by butterfly ballots, deceived by faulty chad-punchers and manipulated by nefarious Republican machine politicians. If Democrats ran the world, we were given to understand, every Florida Democrat, however felonious or easily confused, would have his or her vote counted.
Well, it depends.
This weekend, millions of ordinary Democrats in Florida and Michigan stand to be disenfranchised — quite literally — by their own party. On Saturday, a coterie of enigmatic power brokers in Washington — the Democratic National Committee’s 30-member Rules and Bylaws Committee — meets to decide whether or not to seat delegates from those states at the party convention in August.
As alert readers will remember, Florida and Michigan defied DNC Chairman Howard Dean by scheduling their primaries before Feb. 5. Even as Dean was warning that the states would be punished, 1.7 million Floridians and nearly 600,000 Democrats in Michigan went out and voted anyway.
Think of it: Millions of ordinary Americans, far from the levers of power and having no voice in arcane party rule-making, took the time to make their electoral desires known. And in both states, as it happens, a robust majority chose Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic candidate for president. Is it a matter of indifference what these people think?
In 2000, the Democrats’ emphasis was on the imploring faces of distressed Floridians: the wrinkled Palm Beach matrons declaring they’d been duped into voting for Pat Buchanan; the handful of African-Americans claiming they’d met roadblocks on the way to the polls. We were invited to join each of them in their suffering and outrage.
This time around, both the DNC and the Obama campaign seem at pains to keep the emphasis off individual voters. Their joint interest appears served in speaking of the two rogue states as single, remote entities: Florida this, Michigan that, rules are rules, and let’s remember the good of the party. Barack Obama is ahead in pledged delegates, it’s time to unite behind a candidate, to be the change we’ve been waiting for — and for goodness’ sake, will someone shut that woman up?
Poor Mrs. Clinton. She’s been struggling to gin up sympathy for the voters of Michigan and Florida as a means of supporting her claim to be more popular than her austere, smooth-tongued rival. Yet her impassioned evocations of slavery and the suffragette movement seem to be generating more quiet mirth than earnest nods.
“The lesson of 2000 here in Florida is crystal clear,” the New York senator told Floridians recently. “If any votes aren’t counted, the will of the people isn’t realized and our democracy is diminished.”
Actually, the lesson of Florida seems to be that principles can be held up as utterly inviolable, or dispatched with breezy disdain, so long as they serve the interest of the Democratic Party.
This being 2008, the room at the Wardman Marriott won’t be smoke-filled this weekend, but you can bet there will still be a powerful whiff of Tammany Hall about the place.
Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of The Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
