After watching all of the talking heads tonight I realized that we're in for another big push by the Clinton camp to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations, and that they're trying really hard to tie the whole thing around Obama's neck instead of the state Democratic parties that voted to set the dates in the first place.

I was trying to explain the whole FL and MI issue to my wife, who might be considered a "low information" voter (even though politics is like pure crack for me).  I boiled it down like this:

The national Democratic party sets the primary calendar in such a way as to give a few states that represent very different parts of America an early voice in the nomination process so that everyone can see what a cross-section of Democrats think about the nominees.  Other big states want to get in on the action because it a) brings a ton of money and interest to the state in the form of campaign ads, and b) makes the state more influential in the nominating process.  But NH is required by (state) law to have the first primary in the nation, so any state moving up its voting day forces NH to move theirs up, which prolongs the primary cycle and makes it more expensive for Democrats as a whole to compete over a longer period of time than Republicans with their winner-take-all system.  I explained to my wife that pretty soon we'll be having primaries in the year before the election!  Also, the more states that move up their dates, the more states a candidate has to compete in early on, again making it more expensive for Democrats.

So this brings us to MI, FL, and the DNC.  I told my wife that the DNC laid down the rules that said "If you move your date up beyond this certain point, we'll take away your delegates at the convention."  There has to be stiff consequences, or everyone will just ignore the rule and move up their dates to compete for "influence" in the nominating process, and damn the consequences to the candidates (and party).

I finished by explaining that if the DNC backs down and seats the rogue delegations, it opens the floodgates in the next primary cycle since all of the states will realize that they can win the battle of public opinion about "disenfranchisement,"  and that this hurts the party in many ways - the easiest to understand being the money part.  I then pointed out that Hillary is willing to completely ignore the long-term consequences to the whole Democratic party for the short-term and self-serving goal of getting through this particular primary.  The very definition of selfishness.

[Nowhere do her surrogates talk about the effects of a front-loaded primary (and you'd think they'd be sensitive to it since they're always broke).]

So, I left my wife with this ammunition to do "water cooler" battle with other "low information" voters:  Florida and Michigan want to cut in line in the nominating process, they were told not to do it but did it anyway, and now they (read: Hillary's people) are using short-sighted arguments that create long-term problems for the whole party.  No means no, and that's that.

Anyway, I know most of us get all of this already, but I think we're going to be debating this some more in the weeks to come and I thought this might be an easy push-back.