...This coming weekend, the Rules and Bylaws committee of the Democratic Party meets to discuss what to do about seating both the Florida and Michigan delegations. The last two weeks have produced an escalation of Clinton rhetoric, comparing her effort to get the votes of the two states counted as comparable to that of suffragettes, civil rights marchers, and freedom fighters.

...However, the real story of the Clinton reversal may be more troubling than the usual account suggests, and our own memories may well have obscured the real nature of how we have gotten to where we are 3 months out from the convention. The drumbeat for counting Florida and Michigan actually began in late January, before it became clear to most observers that the nomination was not going to be locked up easily and early.

Well before Clinton began her series of primary contest losses, she made public her plan to press for delegate votes from the two states that had violated the rules. Four days before the Florida primary on January 29, and just two weeks after her 55 percent share of primary votes cast in the Michigan primary in which neither Edwards nor Obama were on the ballot, Clinton announced that she would ask her “Democratic convention delegates to support seating the delegations from Florida and Michigan.” Perhaps the rest of us did not pay much attention at the time, but Florida Democratic Party officials took immediate notice and extended to her their thanks for her promise of support.

Contrary to the familiar view that her argument for counting Michigan and Florida is a tactic of last-minute desperation, Clinton’s reliance on counting both the delegates and the popular vote from both states was integral to her long-term vision of her possible electoral path to the nomination. It is —and has been for months — her Ace in the Hole. Hers is not a late campaign conversion or a post hoc, unplanned maneuver.

The effort to press for the counting of Florida and Michigan was a premeditated act, a deliberate strategy adopted at a time when it was clear that her opposition was relying on her representations that neither outcome would count. It was, in effect, a classic case of bait and switch....

....more at the link