More Primary Angst

While the feud in the Democratic party is ongoing, regarding the decision to deny any voice to Florida Democrats in the Presidential nominee selection process, the Republican National Committee has decided to squander the golden opportunity handed them by the Democrats by announcing that they will strip Florida of half of the delegates to the Republican Convention.

This is not quite as severe as what the Democratic Party has done, but it is still wrong, for all the reasons that I listed in my post "Primarily Wrong," however, this time it goes a little deeper.

In stripping Florida Democratic voters of a voice, the DNC showed themselves to be petty and ridiculous, willing to punish the voters, who had no say in Florida's choice to move it's Primary date. In doing so they handed the Republican Party an opportunity to win a huge PR victory. All the RNC had to do was release a statement saying that while they did not approve of Florida taking this action, they recognized that the common voters had not done it, and still deserved their voice. This would have been unbelievably huge in the General Election when they could have said, hey everybody, look at us, we still believed in Florida, we didn't punish the wrong people just to make ourselves look tough, and we still believe in Florida today! Unfortunately, they didn't do that. They chose, instead, to squander the greatest PR Victory the GOP could ever hope the Dems would hand them.

Admittedly, since the Republican candidates have still been campaigning in Florida, while the Democrats have not, whoever gets the GOP nod will at least have that much to hold over their challenger, as well as the fact that the GOP rebuff was not as harsh as the Dem one was. Unfortunately, we could have had so much more.