"On Wednesday the Michigan senate will pass a bill choosing Jan. 15 as the date for the primary. We understand that this violates the rules of both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. We don't care," Michigan's GOP chair Saul Azunis told The Politico's Roger Simon, summing up the feeling of most Michigan politicians about moving their primary date.
Today the Michigan Senate is expected to vote on bills that could go to the House next week if passed. Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D) has said she'll sign the legislation and thus move Michigan after New Hampshire (when it officially moves up its date) and ahead of Nevada -- disrupting the DNC's plan to diversify its nominating process. That plan considered multiple states (including Mich.), to go between Iowa and New Hampshire, but picked Nevada and settled on a final voting schedule -- or so the DNC thought.
As Simon reports, today the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee will decide how and whether to sanction states that break the approved schedule, with Florida (now Jan. 29, previously Feb. 5) as the main target. The party has two options: first, it could demand that candidates boycott Florida and other rogue states, but that's a tough sell for a swing state with 27 electoral votes and many donors. Second, the DNC could remove states' delegates to the nominating convention. However, as "heated tempers are now, they will have cooled considerably by the time the convention rolls around in August of 2008. And the credentials committee for the convention, whose membership will be packed by the presumptive nominee, can overrule anything the rules committee decides now. In the interest of party unity and because withholding delegates from a candidate who has already won the nomination would be meaningless, the delegates...would probably be seated."
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) has moved her state's primary to Feb. 5, but doesn't face sanctions because states are free to vote any time after that date.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama spoke to the VFW yesterday where he repeated his recent statements and echoed those of Hillary Clinton, that the surge in Iraq has reduced violence, but "no military surge can succeed without political reconciliation and a surge of diplomacy in Iraq and the region. Iraq's leaders are not reconciling. They are not achieving political benchmarks. The only thing they seem to have agreed on is to take a vacation." Obama concluded, "That is why I have pushed for a careful and responsible redeployment of troops engaged in combat operations out of Iraq, joined with direct and sustained diplomacy in the region."
On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee is campaigning in South Carolina for the first time since April, reports The State's Aaron Gould Sheinin. Huckabee's state chief Mike Campbell -- son of former governor and GOP "icon" Carroll Campbell -- said there'll be a "paradigm shift" once money comes in after Huckabee gets his message out.
Elsewhere, the Boston Globe's Lisa Wangsness writes that Mitt Romney points to health care reform as a major achievement as Massachusetts governor but omits details like state and federal government subsidization of "much of the overall cost and that a public board negotiated the benefits and prices that private insurers now offer." Romney chose to use the low cost of premiums available for younger people, instead of premiums for others, "especially the elderly, [for whom] premiums can be several hundred dollars more." The story comes before Romney's speech this Friday detailing his ideas on health care based on the Mass. plan.
In the largest spat of Fred Thompson's campaign so far, he and Rudy Giuliani's team traded barbs over gun control. On his Web site, Thompson wrote he likes "lots of things" about NYC but its "gun laws don't fall in that category," going on to criticize an "activist judge" that "provided Mayor Giuliani's administration with the legal ruling it sought to sue gun makers...." Giuliani's team responded that "those who live in New York in the real world -- not on TV -- know that Rudy Giuliani's record of making the city safe for families speaks for itself."
Finally, The Politico's Kenneth Vogel reports that Newt Gingrich's "American Solutions" 527 group -- exempt from federal campaign finance regulations -- is basically operating like an exploratory committee: giving $17,000 to the Iowa GOP for a booth at the straw poll, paying $140,000 to 15 aides and consultants and $126,000 for travel, while taking in donations of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars that would be illegal if he were running a presidential campaign.
Get these and today's other election stories at RCP's Politics and Elections page.
