Seating Florida Delegates: Howard Dean Gets Motivated

After huddling yesterday among themselves, Florida’s congressional delecation and state chair Karen Thurman met with DNC chair Howard Dean, and emerged making positive noises. In attendance at the meeting from Florida were Sen. Bill Nelson, Reps. Alcee Hastings, Corrine Brown, Bob Wexler, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Ron Klein, Tim Mahoney, Kathy Castor, Allan Boyd, Kendrick Meek and Karen Thurman. Here is the joint statement:

“We are all committed to doing everything we can to ensure that a Florida delegation is seated in Denver. We all agree that whatever the solution, it must have the support of both campaigns.  While there may be differences of opinion in how we get there, we are all committed to ensuring that Florida’s delegation is seated in Denver. We’re committed to working with both campaigns to reach a solution as soon as realistically possible. We are also laying the groundwork to ensure we win in Florida in November and spent time here today talking about how to do just that.  We will continue to work towards a solution to ensure delegates are seated and logistics are in place for a Florida delegation in Denver.”

Ok, everybody wants the delegates to go to Denver, but what they’ll do there is where it gets sticky. Remember, both campaigns have to approve the settlement. Hillary’s campaign sounded facilitative:

The Clinton campaign praised the meeting. “We have long maintained that pretending the voters of Florida and Michigan don’t exist is not fair in principle and unwise in practice,” said spokesman Phil Singer. “Chairman Dean is clearly committed to seating the Florida delegation and we urge Senator Obama to join us in calling on the rules and bylaws committee to make this a reality.”

So.. .what’s Obama joining? Well, it’s hard to tell. The Delphic utterance from Tom Daschle is below:

(FL US Rep Debbie Wasserman-Schultz) also expressed a willingness to consider a proposal that would allow the full delegation to weigh in at the convention, but for each delegate to get just half a vote.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, a supporter of Sen. Barack Obama, rejected that proposal, which seemed to gain traction as prospects for a new contest grew more remote.

He told CNN’s Gloria Borger that the Illinois senator would like to “give Florida the opportunity to vote” – but not in a way that would change the overall outcome.

In other words, Florida’s votes can count… but only if they don’t count.  Thanks a lot, Tom. We knew we could count on you

Dean seems to be moving; his earlier “they didn’t follow the rules, tough luck” posture has been sliding off its pedestal a bit now that the word is out on the machinations by Donna Brazile  to increase the penalty from half the delegates to all the delegates- that position seems to no longer be defensible. As the days go by and the pressure mounts, we’ll see who is working toward a solution and who’s obstructing said solution. Looks like Howard isn’t going down with the ship on this one.

A little funny business posted by Ben Smith last night with Florida adopting a solution similar to the proposed Michigan one – half the delegates being allocated by Florida’s January 29 primary, and half by “national delegate count”, whatever that is, seems to have been a false lead. Nobody’s proposing it at the meeting today.

FL Senator Bill Nelson is on record as supporting going with the original penalty from the DNC rules before Donna Brazile bumped it up to the death penalty – half the delegates. Obama’s campaign shot that one down- too… umm… representative or something. See Dashle’s statement earlier. Maybe it failed the “doesn’t affect the outcome” test.