The sport of politics. The politics of sport.

I don’t know about you, but I still don’t understand how the Democratic Party could have allowed itself to fall into a situation where presidential primaries in two major states, Florida and Michigan, would be rendered null and void. I mean, how dumb can Party leaders be?

Really dumb, it seems. There seems to be a general consensus among people I’ve polled that if either party is capable of botching its election process, it’s going to be the Dems. This just points to the overall perception issue of the Party as incapable of putting together a disciplined, winning political game plan. Because the Bush administration has made such a mess of the country, the Democratic ticket this year may ultimately be able to overcome that perception. But the fact remains that the Party should never have put itself in this position.

From what I’ve heard, this is what happened: both Democratic and Republican state lawmakers got tired of Iowa and New Hampshire getting all the limelight as the first two states to hold caucuses and primaries.

But while most of the other states accepted existing rules, some more grudgingly than others, party leaders in Florida and Michigan decided to literally make a federal case out of the situation by moving their primary contests to earlier dates. In direct violation of party rules, Florida lawmakers moved their primary to Jan. 29 while their Michigan counterparts moved theirs to Jan. 15.

The Republican and Democratic National Committees punished Florida and Michigan, but the Republicans were a lot more savvy and less draconian about it (i.e., they didn’t take a “scorched earth” approach; i.e., they were SMARTER about it). The RNC allowed half of their Florida and Michigan delegations to be seated at their convention. This meant Republican candidates could campaign in those states and emerge with primary results reflecting a fair sense of those candidates’ respective popularity levels; only based on a smaller delegate pool. As a result, the Republicans don’t need to worry about redoing their primaries in these two HUGELY IMPORTANT GENERAL ELECTION STATES.

The DNC, on the other hand, decided to punish these two HUGELY IMPORTANT GENERAL ELECTION STATES by insisting that none of their Democratic Party delegates would be seated. The DNC also forbade its candidates from campaigning in either state, which the candidates agreed to. Barack Obama went a step further in Michigan and had his name removed from the ballot.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign, in what seems to have been a move intended to create trouble — demonstrating, in my view, Clinton’s tendency to put personal ambition over the interests of the Democratic Party — left her name on the ballot in both states and encouraged people to vote for her. The Obama campaign countered by encouraging voters who favored him to vote “Uncommitted” in Michigan to counter the Clinton moves.

More than one million people cast votes for Clinton in Florida, where she went, in essence, uncontested. And now she insists that primary was “fair.” This has only confirmed in the minds of many of us that Hillary Clinton is perfectly willing to NOT play fair. And that’s a big turnoff.

Now the Democratic Party is scrambling to fix its own mess. The clock is ticking on primary re-dos, and it looks like Michigan might have its act a bit more together on this than Florida. (Who is surprised about that?) Someone needs to pay for these sequels, and it had better not be the taxpayers, who had no reason to expect such a botched process by the people they pay to spend their tax dollars wisely.

Florida State Sen. Steve Geller on Sunday insisted that he had pled with the candidates to campaign in his state, which sounded to me as though he was perfectly happy placing them between a rock and a hard place — challenging them to defy the DNC. Then he issued a not-so-veiled threat that the Democratic Party could kiss Florida goodbye in the general election if the votes already cast were not recognized.

Geller also said that DNC Chairman Howard Dean had never contacted him. That seems pretty counterproductive, I thought. All in all, the debate between state leaders, their “executive committees” and the DNC is shaping up to look like the worst kind of (childish) sibling rivalry.

I just wonder what the Democratic Party is learning from this debacle. Part of the reason I became an Independent was over frustration with my former home team’s strategic amateurism. The mess Democrats made of their 2008 primaries in Florida and Michigan have only confirmed my sense that they remain unready for political prime time.

It’s unclear to me whether Florida and Michigan voters intending to vote Democratic really understood the injury done to them by their own state lawmakers. I mean, they were basically disenfranchised by the egotistical aims of their party leaders. And for what? Now those delegates are up for grabs. If state Party leaders aren’t kicking themselves, they should be. Practically every state in the Union, at least in the Democratic contest, is having its say this year. Who woulda thunk it?

Yours, Truly, A.F. Cook