Democrats’ primary quandary

Republicans are having a field day in Michigan and Florida, accusing the Democrats’ presidential front-runners of planning to boycott those states’ early primaries next January.

Incredibly, this is what the Democratic National Committee wants its presidential contenders to do. A half-dozen, including Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, pledge to do just that to abide by party rules that threaten to strip them of their delegates if they campaign in either contest.

Taking full advantage of the political primary mess in which Democrats find themselves, Republican party officials assured voters last week that all its presidential hopefuls will actively campaign in the Jan. 15 Michigan primary and the Jan. 29 Florida primary.

“We have had conversations with all the Republican presidential campaigns and they said they will continue to campaign here,” said Michigan Republican Chairman Saul Anuzis.

“The Democrats are actually asking their candidates to boycott the primary and not campaign here or they will take away 100 percent of their delegates in the state. Our rules say we will lose 50 percent of our delegates, but nobody in our party is talking about boycotting anything. They are coming to campaign,” Mr. Anuzis told me.

In Florida, Republican Chairman Jim Greer, who has been in touch with all the candidates, told me they will fully campaign in his state, too. “We are approaching the primary from a welcome standpoint, while it appears the Democrats are running from it,” he said.

Assurances by top advisers to the Republican candidates underscored their plans that, no matter what the rules say about primary dates, there will be no boycott of any primary in their party. “We’re going to continue to campaign aggressively in [both] these states,” said Rudolph Giuliani’s spokeswoman Maria Comella.

The GOP’s primary calendar rules, just like the Democrats’, prohibit any primary before Feb. 5, outside of the four contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. But the Republican-run legislature in Florida moved its primary up early last month, defying the party’s rules, and the Michigan legislature, with the support of both parties, did likewise last week.

When Democrats in both states prepared to participate in the primaries, the DNC moved to strip them of all convention delegates if their candidates decided to campaign there. Florida Democrats, faced with the untenable disaster of boycotting their state’s primary, threatened to take the DNC into court for “disenfranchising” Democratic voters.

Then last week Democratic officials seemed to soften their rhetoric in a bid to find a way out of the impasse after six of its candidates pledged not to campaign in either primary contest.

But the written statement by Hillary, and maybe some of the others, may not be worth the paper its printed on, Democrats told me.

First, pledge or no pledge, all of the Democratic candidates’ names will be on the statewide primary ballots anyway.

Second, both Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama, the front-runners, seem to be running campaigns in both states anyway. They have ground organizations there as well as staff. They have scheduled fund-raisers in Florida this month and later this year. All participated in a Spanish language broadcast forum in Miami Sunday on Univision, the Hispanic/Latino TV network.

Initially, Mrs. Clinton was not eager to agree to at least tacitly abide by DNC rules forbidding any campaigning in the two states. Both are megastates that could decide the outcome of the 2008 presidential election and any Democrats who sit out the primary would do so at their peril.

Knowledgeable Democrats told me Mrs. Clinton was the last to sign on to the pledge after carefully weighing the pros and cons of such a decision. She did, after all, hold a huge lead in Florida over all her rivals, and led in Michigan, too. Her organizations in both states would work for her, and at this point she was justifiably confident she would win the “beauty contest” primaries, giving her a boost going into the Feb. 5 super Tuesday contests that would all but decide next year’s nominee.

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