Speaker Pelosi speaks a truth about the Florida flap
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has let the cat out of the bag and said what everyone has known all along:
The Democratic National Committee's removal of all of Florida's 2008 convention delegates for violating party rules about scheduling state primaries before Feb. 5 is meaningless.
Speaking with a covey of political reporters at a lunch in Washington today, Pelosi was asked what she thought of the delegate termination. "That will be determined by the presidential nominee," said Pelosi, who will serve as honorary chair of the convention next August in Denver.
"The Democratic National Committee is the ruling authority now," she said, "but the tradition is that the presidential candidate will decide."
And even if Alaska's Mike Gravel were the Democratic nominee, he wouldn't be sufficiently suicidal to write off any state with as many electoral votes (25) as populous Florida.
--Andrew Malcolm
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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Anything that breaks Iowa-New Hampshire stranglehold on the Democratic party's nomination is fine with me.
It's time that the rest of us got a say in who runs for the Democratic party.
2004 showed that.
Posted by: Bill Lenner | October 10, 2007 at 11:30 AM
Seeing as Gravel is the ONLY democrat campaigning in Florida, he's obviously not writing it off now...
www.gravel08.us
Posted by: Kyle Gregory | December 17, 2007 at 02:09 PM