While he has held elected office, including several stints as a Michigan State University trustee, he has been more important as a major player behind the scenes. Old-timers still remember his brilliant coup in 1988, when he organized a stealth campaign to bus voters to that year’s mostly ignored Michigan Democratic caucuses.
The result was a stunning and totally unexpected victory for Jesse Jackson, humiliating the party leadership.
So when Ferguson talks, it is a good idea to listen. Though he is often working a number of angles, his argument about the superdelegates makes a lot of sense. They were supposed to be seated automatically, regardless of whether the party selected the rest of their delegates in a primary, a caucus, or a marzipan contest.
His argument about the elected delegates is a lot weaker, however, and he knows it. First of all, if Michigan’s elected delegates are seated, it will make a mockery of the whole rules process.
If they get away with having a primary three weeks before the rules said they could, what’s to prevent some other state from having its 2012 primary in December 2011? Or December 2009, for that matter?
But I am glad he has filed this challenge, because it illustrates what some of us have known all along. If both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are still standing when the primaries end in June, this will go to the Democratic National convention in Denver.
The convention will decide in the last week of August whether to seat Michigan and Florida, and their decision will determine the nominee. If they are seated, Clinton likely wins. If not, Obama does.
And taking it to Denver might not be a bad thing. Nothing wrong with a little democracy in action – as long as neither side feels robbed.
But what continues to amaze me is the absolute boneheaded stupidity of the Michigan Democratic Party. Last weekend, local democrats met in district conventions to pick some of the delegates elected in January, in case they ever get seated.
Based on the way the vote broke down, Clinton won 47, and the leadership let her camp pick all those folks.
The uncommitted slate won 36 delegates, and the Obama people logically thought they should get to name those, since he is the only remaining candidate left.
But the party bureaucrats only let them pick half of those, and shoved their own people into the remaining slots. They took the selection of another 45 delegates away from the people entirely.
They will be picked by the state central committee of party insiders. As the Free Press’s Brian Dickerson observed, what a wonderful way to alienate the new voters the Obama campaign has brought into the Democratic Party. That seems crazy, until you realize that for apparatchiks, the process isn’t really about winning. It is about control.
Jack Lessenberry's realization of "the absolute boneheaded stupidity of the Michigan Democratic Party" only came to him after this year's primary debacle.
For me, the absolute boneheaded stupidity of the Michigan Democratic Party has been proven after years of watching them in occasional positions of power in state governement.
I'll be awaiting the Detroit Free Press' quadrennial endorsement of the Democrat nominee, and shall look forward to Jack Lessenberry's string of tirades in the Metro Times on behalf of that same candidate. As predictable as the leaves turning.
Posted by: Anonymous | April 24, 2008 at 04:13 PM
Mr. Lessenberry, please don't leave us hanging. Your journalistic integrity has been questioned by a Hillsdale official in the homeschooling thread.
Posted by: Anonymous | April 25, 2008 at 12:03 AM