1) why did everyone (except hillary) take their names off the ballot in michigan but NOT in florida?

2) how is the michigan situation and the florida situation any different with respect to broken rules? seems to me the only difference is that candidates took their names off in michigan but not in florida. but the same rule was broken.

These are good questions that get overlooked. Thanks for asking.

The DNC asked all of the candidates to take their name off of the ballot in Michigan in early January. (IIRC, it could have been the last week of December.) They did this because of Michigan's refusal to change its primary back to the schedule they, and all of the candidates, agreed to in the spring and summer of 2007. This was not something the candidates decided to do on their own.

The clearest answer to your first question is because Florida state law prohibits changing a ballot within 60 days of the scheduled election. This law literally has zero exceptions. This came up in 2006 when Mark Foley resigned five weeks before the November election and Republicans lost a suit to get his name removed from the ballot. Foley's name remained on the ballot in the CD16 race even though the candidate was someone else.

The bigger difference between Michigan and Florida, in the eyes of the DNC, is how much control the party in each state had in setting the schedule. Democrats control both chambers of the Michigan House and hold the governors office. They had control over breaking the agreement and putting it back together if they wanted their primary to count. When Michigan refused to use its ability to fix the problem, the DNC asked the candidates to remove their names from the ballot in an effort to ensure the primary would not count.

In Florida it was just the opposite, at least on the surface. Republicans control the state legislature and they hold the governor's office. Florida was also cut more slack because the measure to change the primary date was attached to a bill requiring paper receipts for Florida's infamous touchscreen voting machines, which the state and national Democratic party wanted desperately.

Florida's Democratic party leaders were a lot less pristine when you looked at the details. Nearly all of them wanted to defy the DNC and bump Florida into the first four primaries and didn't have a problem playing chicken with Dean and the DNC to do it. But they were powerless to change the date unless the Republicans in the lege and Crist wanted to go along with it.

If a political machine thinks they can get more power by promoting a black man, they will. Heck... if they think they can get power by promoting a duck, they will. Political machines are about power and patronage, not personal preferences.

You're missing it, and you don't know how a machine works.

Machines don't get power over an outside pol unless they have something that politician needs. Getting behind Obama doesn't give the Daley organization shit because they have nothing Obama needs. He doesn't need their fundraising network, he doesn't need their machine to get re-elected to the Senate and he doesn't need them to carry Illinois this November.

They didn't start his political career, they didn't get him elected to the Illinois lege or his teaching job at UC, and they backed a different horse in the 2004 Senate race. If they're sucking up to him now because he is a hugely popular senator and the likely presidential nominee - something you present without any evidence - that is totally different from the power they would have over someone who came out of their system. They can promote Obama or anyone else, but that doesn't mean they have power over him.

The Patrick Fitzgerald thing is so huge to understanding where the relationship between Obama and the Daley machine is at. Obama was the one person on earth who had the procedural place to nominate a new USA for the Northern District when Fitzgerald's term expired in 2006. There was immense pressure on him from the Daley organization to do exactly that. If they had any influence over Obama at all Fitzgerald would have been gone. Obama didn't play along, and Patrick Fitzgerald continues to send Daley's machine cronies to prison, and work his way up to the mayor's office. Fitzgerald is going to finish this year at the minimum, and if the next president doesn't replace him he will be on the job in Chicago through 2012.

Want more? Neither Mayor Daley or his brother even have any honorary roles in Obama's campaign. That's pretty amazing for the long-serving and popular mayor of the largest city in a candidate's home state, and even more so when this family has been a major player in Democratic politics for generations. Try to imagine if Barry Goldwater was still alive and active in politics, and McCain had nothing to do with him. That's what this is.