The Florida and Michigan Problem

I completely agreed that both Florida and Michigan should have had their delegates stripped on the democratic side when they moved their primaries up earlier than February 4th in violation of party rules. But now things are different.

Florida and Michigan together possess 367 delegates (including super-delegate). Currently the difference between Obama and Clinton is about 105 delegates, with Obama being ahead in the count. There are only 611 delegates left which are still up for grabs. If this past Tuesday was any indication, they will most likely be split fairly evenly. This would leave Clinton down 265 delegates, and Obama only 154 votes shy of the nomination. Those sweet 367 emissaries from the cheating states should look pretty desirable to both campaigns right about now.

Before John Edwards dropped out of the race he was able to rack up a couple of delegates for himself. Some of those were automatically divvied out to the remaining contenders, but Edwards was able to hold on to 26 delegates since he "suspended" his campaign rather than simply "dropping out." What a sweet day it would be for John Edwards if his measly 26 delegates were able to decide the nomination.

This mess may be a blessing in disguise for the Democrats, however. With the historic nature and the closeness of the race, little attention is being given to John McCain. Now that he has the Republican nomination we can presume that he's rushing to gather support from the conservatives who loathe him so. Whether it will work or not will be pretty hard to tell, since nobody will be covering it. My guess is that McCain will launch a pretty big accusation at the Democrats or maybe have another scandal that turns out to be the product of the liberal media. Anything else just won't make headlines, and without headlines John McCain will head down the same path as Rudy Giuliani did. The path of "isn't he still in the race?"