Harold Ickes, a rules committee member and Hillary Clinton adviser, just spent 10 minutes badgering Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) in support of the Clinton campaign’s Michigan position. The Clinton campaign says that it should get 73 delegates from the Michigan primary and the Obama campaign should get 0, with 55 going as uncommitted. Ickes said that the delegate allocation has to consider the principal of “fair reflection,” with voters’ preferences for “uncommitted” being accurately reflected. Since no one actually voted for “Barack Obama” on the ticket, that would mean Obama would get no delegates. But Sen. Levin told Ickes he had the concept of fair reflection all wrong. “You’re calling for a ‘fair reflection’ of a flawed primary,” Levin told Ickes, to massive applause. “What we’re trying to do is to keep a party together so that we can win a critical state in November. And let me tell you the precedent that we set it seems to me is a good precedent if circumstances like this ever existed again. … It’s an unusual circumstance.”
