I think the rabid Clintonites posting here that the existing Michigan vote is fair because "Didn't Obama know his name should be on teh ballot????!?" would benefit from reviewing what ACTUALLY happened. All the candidates were on the ballot to begin with; when the party decided to punish Michigan for moving up the date of its primary, all the major candidates (except Hillary!--how convenient!) voluntarily removed their names from the ballot.

Is the whole thing a mess? Sure. But to say that Obama "neglected" to get his name on the ballot is flat-out wrong, and makes you either ignorant or a liar.

This is a big Democratic party problem. It's amazing to me that no one saw this coming ... FL and MI knew, ahead of time, that their votes wouldn't count. No one fought this ridiculous situation ahead of the vote.

To whom would they give the delegates from the Michigan voters who voted for no one over Hillary? How would the party explain to Obama supporters in FL that they were entirely disenfranchised?

This is a huge social justice issue for the party, not for the Candidates. Hillary gamed the system to some extent, but she knew the rules, too.

In my family, if you agree to a set of rules before a game, you don't change them during or after the game. If you don't think the rules are fair, you argue it ahead of time, until you get it resolved.

If these votes count, it would be a slap in the face to the whole notion that agreements matter at all to Democrats. On the other hand, I don't like seeing voters disenfranchised. I agree that the PARTY should come up with the cash and hold either primaries or caucuses in both states, and seat the delegates accordingly.

As someone from Michigan I will definitely say that the delegates in Michigan and Florida need to be seated. I am sure the Democratic "powers that be" are kicking themselves royally for putting out the decree against them in the first place - I have never really understood why they care when the primaries are held anyway. Michigan certainly declared very early on so it is not like it was a surprise to anyone that it was going to be earlier. This is what happens when you use power to "punish" those that don't do what you want when you want them to do it. God forbid anyone decide something for themselves!! We have a similar situation in Lansing right now - people who are elected officials can't vote the way their constituents want them to because they fear reprisal for going against the "party line". So what happens - nothing real gets accomplished. We can't even get the clean-air bill out of committee!

If the Democrats want to protect their "party of change" image, then they have no choice but to figure out what to do with the Michigan and Florida delegates. To continue to let this situation fester is a far worse black eye on the party than having the candidate declared by super-delegates.

The other point here is that no one told Obama not to be on the ballot. He could have been. He chose not to - he wasn't looking very far down the road, now was he?

...they should re-vote. However, I'm not sure it's that easy. As the last poster said, would there be a primary or a caucus? What date would favor which candidate? These two couldn't agree on a sandwich order at a deli right now, much less something like this.

But the sad reality is that we'd likely end up with a very similar result as the rest of the country, with Clinton winning 53-47 and +8 delegates in MI and Obama winning 52-48 and +11 delegates (or whatever, I'm not looking up delegate counts for a theoretical). And then do we have a neatly solved issue?

And to those posters who swear that the first votes should count, there's a very simple analogy that Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune made. Having that vote count, would be like halfway through the baseball season deciding that the spring training games (exhibition games played as tuneups and as a way to evaluate players) counted toward deciding who got into the playoffs. Joan, I know your Giants won't have to worry about going to the playoffs anytime soon (of course, neither will my Reds), you can see that would be horribly unfair, as would (for different reasons) saying in the middle of the season "oh by the way, we're going to re-play those spring training games in October, and they'll count then."

Sorry, those are the rules going in, those are the rules that need to be enforced. And the fact that Clinton supporters are clamoring for this, it's solely because they think it's to their advantage. You know if Michigan or Florida had demographics that were more like, say, South Carolina, Clinton supporters would want nothing to do with this.

To FL and MI voters, I'm sorry, but your state party screwed it up for you in a laughable power play. How much more say would you have in the nominating process if your party leaders had stuck to the rules and put your primaries in, say, mid-March?

"The other point here is that no one told Obama not to be on the ballot. He could have been. He chose not to - he wasn't looking very far down the road, now was he?"

Wow. Just wow.

Would you still be praising that kind of backstabbing duplicity if it worked against Hillary instead of for her?

The situational ethics and "do anything to win" attitude that some people are praising--as long as it benefits their candidate--are truly revolting.

Excellent analogy using baseball spring training games.

All canidates had good solutions such as the flat tax proposed by hucklbe.

Bring jobs back not retrain for lower paying jobs by Romney.

Nassa reform, reformed to a trash can.

there should be a balance of ecomnomics, there should be tariff taxes to balance. The only thing that has changed is the rich are making more profits because prices dont come down just labor costs.

Long term look is since we are the largest commumers of products who will buy them when nobody has money. This is a short term get richer by the rich, quick and then bail.

It seems to me everyone is looking at today and not tomorrow if I were rich I would not forget who was resposible for it.