What Shall We Do About Florida?

Some people in the state of Florida -- which is already sorely cursed by having too many Republican governors, too many bowel-bound Cuban exiles, and absolutely no high ground -- are worried. They fear that because of the Democratic delegate difficulties hanging fire there, threatening to create a fiasco rivaling the events that plunged the U.S. into a darkness that has lasted for eight years now, their state will be blamed, just as it was, and rightfully, in 2000.

The delegate situation is almost the twin of that in Michigan, with the important difference that though neither he nor H.Clinton campaigned in Florida, honoring the punishment meted out to the state by the DNC for moving its primary date up into late January instead of having it in early March, this time B. Obama's people, more prudent than those in Michigan, kept his name on the ballot, though, as in Michigan, again H. Clinton won, with the smaller figure of 50%.

The Florida situation is more mysterious to me than is the Michigan one, because of some questions that I haven't seen the news reports answering, maybe because the answers make so little sense that the authorities are loathe to let them be known.

One is, since a record number of people already voted for Obama and Clinton in the Florida primary on January 29 to the tune of over 1.7 million, why can't the delegate count so determined stand, while the DNC drops its vindictiveness and seats them? If the pair didn't campaign, so what? Is there a law that they have to campaign? That just means the campaigns saved some badly needed funds. Meanwhile surely the literacy rate is high enough in Florida that their views were almost as well known in the first of the year as they would be in this coming June, six months later.

I am missing something important there, but I hzve been unable to find out or to conjecture what it could be.

A combined plan of in-person voting combined with mail-in voting, to be completed in June, is being floated in Florida, but at least on the surface no one likes it. The entire Democrat Congressional delegation is on record as being opposed. Why? The news reports never pass along any explanations.

The H.Clinton and B.Obama campaigns are also opposed. Why? I think it is because they don't like the mail-in voting, because they fear it will open chances for fraud and ballot-counting irregularities. The H. Clinton campaign wants a state-run in-person re-do. As yet I haven't seen any statements on what B. Obama wants. I think that, having in a sense missed the boat in Michigan, though he would bitterly deny that, now he is just doing some watchful waiting, leaving it to the responsible parties, which by all rights should be the DNC but most likely won't be, to come up with something palatable.

But despite all the air of impasse and of ponderous movement if any, things may not be that bad, and actually it looks as if all that really remains to clear the air is raising a mere 12 million dollars in Florida and the same sum in Michigan. That is the amount needed to do the in-person redos, which the Obamas ought to like even more than do the Clintons, since they lost both the previous bouts in those states.

So, from here that is what needs to be done and ought to be easy enough to do. But they had better start moving. I know from bitter personal experience that the most ominous day of the year, June 22, the Summer Solstice, when the nights start getting longer than the days, always comes up like a shot.

Side note: I loved the matching titles that I picked for these last two posts, but for a long time I didn't know why, except that they sounded musical. This morning suddenly it came to me. That second person inside my head that does most of my writing was remembering a sea chanty on one of my concept tapes. The chanty starts with "What shall we do with a drunken sailor," and that it is repeated twice, ending with "...so earl-li-ay in the morning?" followed by a resounding burp.