(NOTE: the festivities started at 9:30 AM ET; Joe’s liveblog is here. You can watch the DNC’s live video feed here and here.)
Today’s the delegate showdown day as the Democratic National Committee’s rules and bylaws committee sits down and attempts to come up with a solution for seating some, all or none of the delegates by the renegade states of Florida and Michigan. Those states chose to move up their primaries in violation of party rules and the penalty all candidates and states agree on was that those delegates cannot be seated.
There is supposed to be a huge rally at this meeting; purportedly 10,000 Hillary supporters—along with McCain and Huckabee fans (!?)—will show up. (Joe Sudbay of Americablog is at the Wardman Park Marriott to liveblog the meeting and just IMed me to say there aren’t ten thousand people there, and he has pix.)
“We don’t think it’s a helpful dynamic to create chaos,” David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, said. “In the interest of party unity, we’re encouraging our supporters not to protest.”
...Allida Black, a professor at George Washington University and a Clinton supporter, is helping to organize the demonstration and is hoping that people come from all over the nation. “We’re trying to flood it,” she says
The Clinton campaign believes that all delegates should be seated, the argument being every vote should count, since “the people” didn’t make the decision to move up the primary. On the flip side, since Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan, the results of that primary can hardly be considered a barometer of the will of the voters there; in Florida, he was on the ballot, but did not campaign, something both candidates also agreed to at the outset. Given all of this, it will come down to a decision by the 30 members of the rules committee. And who is on the committee?
The committee has several Democratic heavyweights such as Harold Ickes, one of Hillary Clinton’s top advisers; Donna Brazile, the campaign manager for Al Gore in 2000; and Alice Germond, the DNC secretary. The rest is made up of lawyers and state party members otherwise unlikely to appear on network TV.
And Ickes position is, no surprise. Read below the fold.