The Chelsea Standard
A Heritage Newspaper
Weekly Publication
Is it time to make a deal on redo?
Tim Skubick
PUBLISHED: March 27, 2008
Michigan Democrats are not following that advice and have made an even uglier mess out of this ill-fated and mishandled embarrassment called a presidential primary re-do.
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Last week an agreement was reached to restage the Michigan Democratic Party presidential primary vote. Shouts of joy were heard in Washington, but there were no shouts in Lansing.
The beloved Legislature was needed to create the primary and, more importantly, Republicans were needed to give the Democrats the necessary votes to do it.
That was an automatic prescription for another round of "Let's Make A Deal."
Republicans had the Dems over the barrel and wanted something in return. If the shoe had been on the other foot, rest assured the Democrats would have done the same thing to the GOP.
The first guy up with a demand was Rep. Craig DeRoche (R-Novi.) He found some irony in all this. On one hand, the Democrats are trying to recall the House GOP leader, and here they were knocking on his door asking for his support at the same time.
Now, DeRoche is a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them. He was willing to give something if the recall was dropped, but Democrats refused to back off.
But the Democrats had other problems. The Hillary Clinton campaign was eager for the redo, but the Barack Obama campaign was not.
That put the House Democratic speaker on the spot.
Rep. Andy Dillon, who leans toward Obama, has a badly divided caucus. Some of his friends are for Hillary; some of his friends are for Obama. And Dillon is caught in the middle.
Gov. Jennifer Granholm really wanted this redo, and when her firehouse primary went up in smoke she talked about a revote, but ran into stiff opposition from some county clerks, who wanted no part of this mess.
Then the Senate Democrats got into the act.
After a closed-door meeting, key players emerged saying there were not enough votes to pass the primary.
Nobody would concede it was dead, but one senator concurred that it was on life support and somebody had their finger on the switch. Another chimed in that the redo needed CPR.
Ron Gettlefinger, head of the United Auto Workers union, and one of the four folks in Washington who hatched the redo scheme was not amused.
He got on the horn and called Democrats, reportedly telling them that the failure to order a new election was making Michigan a national embarrassment.
But here is the rub. Nobody from the Obama camp was in on the deal hatching and, since they had no ownership, Obama folks were not eager to say yes to any redo.
Compounding the problem, the Senate Democratic ranks were as equally split as the House Democrats, so minus a consensus on what to do, there was nothing to do on the redo.
Sometime soon, you'll know if the corpse winked.
Tim Skubick blogs daily on the MIcentral portion of Heritage Newspapers' Web site,www.heritage.com
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