For much of the day yesterday, The Huffington Post carried this banner headline:
CLINTON CAMP SAYS IT WILL USE THE NUCLEAR OPTION
All that was missing was a Drudge-style siren. The gist of the story, which first carried the headline “Clinton Camp Considering Nuclear Option,” was that Clinton folks might try to “ram” a decision through the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, which has its next scheduled meeting on May 31, to seat the delegations from the disputed Michigan and Florida primaries. In other words, the Clinton people not only want Florida and Michigan to count — because Hillary “won” them — but they might actually try to make them count.
It’s hard to work up the solicited level of righteous indignation about this revelation when Clinton and her aides have been arguing for several months now, publicly and incessantly, that Michigan and Florida should count. Is that position crassly self-serving? Does it demonstrate a blatant disregard for fair play and a blithe willingness to bend the rules for personal advantage? Does it betray a ruthless, win-at-any-cost, positively Clintonian approach to electoral politics?
You might say so, especially if you’re an Obama partisan. Alternatively, if you’re a Clinton partisan or a Democrat in Michigan or Florida, you might say the people of those fine states deserve to have their voices heard and their votes count, etc, etc.
Either way, I wouldn’t call it explosive news. Since it was the Rules & Bylaws Committee that ruled last December that Michigan and Florida’s rogue delegations would not count and would not be seated, it stands to reason that the way to change that decision is to get the Committee to reverse itself.
Is that the nuclear option? Would it, in other words, lay to waste all that was built before it, namely Obama’s otherwise insurmountable and indisputable lead? Only if it happened in a vacuum — with no other developments in the race between now and May 31. Or if, say, Obama were to slow or halt Clinton’s momentum today by pulling off a surprise win in Indiana.
But it isn’t going to unfold that way. It’s true that the known allegiances among the 30 members Rules & Bylaws Committee tilt toward Clinton. Harold Ickes is a member of the committee, after all, and he’s the aide spearheading Hillary’s effort to win a favorable resolution to the Florida and Michigan problem. But as the HuffPo story rightly goes on to say, the Clinton campaign would attempt the strategy of “ramming” a reversal through the Rules & Bylaws Committee only “under specific circumstances” — circumstances that begin with Clinton having an exceptionally good day today in Indiana and North Carolina. From there, she would have to continue her momentum by racking up victories in primaries through the end of May, thereby hammering home her argument that she’s the better general election candidate in November.
Those circumstances would have to prevail, but even they would not be enough. There would also have to be a concurrent, spreading panic among Democratic officials and officeholders about Obama’s liabilities, the kind of panic that would lead super-delegates of all types to line up in large numbers behind Clinton. At that point — i.e., in the midst of a dramatic upheaval in the party — members of the Rules & Bylaws Committee might be willing to risk their own political futures by deciding to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations according to the primary results. But they would be following, not leading. The bomb would have gone off already. The Committee would act on the Day After.
Is any of it likely to happen? I still don’t think so. But in the past few weeks, the impossible has become merely the improbable.