Ickes: Michigan Deal Doesn’t Help Party Unity

Hillary Clinton campaign adviser Harold Ickes said it was “preposterous” for Barack Obama’s campaign to take four Michigan delegates that belong to Clinton.

Clinton received 69 delegates compared to Obama’s 59 as part of an agreement reached by the Democrats’ Rules And Bylaws Committee Saturday.

Ickes has said that four of the delegates that Obama received are Clinton’s, according to the results of the state’s January primary. (Both candidates’ Michigan delegate numbers will be cut in half, to 29.5 and 34.5, respectively, as part of a punishment for the state’s decision to to hold its primary in January without approval of the Democratic National Committee.)

Here’s Ickes on MSNBC Tuesday:

Obama took himself off the ballot [in Michigan] voluntarily. We think he took himself off the ballot for two reasons in Michigan, so that he would not be on the Michigan primary ballot. One, he wanted to curry favor with Iowa voters. Two, it was not at all clear he could win it, so he took the graceful way out and took his name off the ballot.

Now, he comes back and says, “Oh, by the way, I want the 55 uncommitted delegates,” which are recognized under our rules as a presidential status, ‘and that’s not enough. I want’ — initially, their proposal was to take nine delegates from Hillary.

It is a preposterous proposition. And for a campaign that preaches party unity and the blather around all of that, it puts the lie to it that he comes in, his campaign operatives come in and say, ‘Let’s take nine from Hillary,’ and end up taking four, and then turn around and ask for party unity.

The Rules and Bylaws Committee violated the most fundamental rule of our party, fair reflection.

Ickes, however, later reiterated Clinton’s vow to support whomever becomes the nominee.

We are working hard to make sure that she reaches the number [of delegates needed to win the nomination] … But she has said — I’m not going to get into the timing and any of that sort of stuff, Andrea, but she has said that, as Barack Obama has said, that if she’s the nominee, he will swing in behind her. And she has said likewise. If he’s the nominee, she will swing in behind him.

Watch a part of Ickes’s MSNBC interview below: