Florida's Democrats are embroiled in an intra-party dispute over internal rules, delegates and which states get to vote first in the presidential primaries. For political reporters, this is fascinating stuff, and every little new development advances a story line about back-room squabbling.
For the public at large, such coverage can make politics seem remarkably trivial — one reason that some in the news business dismiss the story as "inside baseball."
In the past two weeks, at political events and television news shows, I've heard two mainstream campaign reporters use that phrase to describe the ongoing machinations over Florida's decision to move its primary to Jan. 29 against the wishes of the national Democratic Party. One was citing a national political reporter who'd privately called the party fight the biggest inside-baseball story in America.
It made me go back and look up the phrase's exact meaning and origin. According to press critic and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, the term originated with the baseball analyst Bill James, of Bill James Baseball Abstract fame.
"James was originally a press critic," Rosen says in his blog, PressThink. "He thought baseball journalists had a firm grasp on the wrong end of the telescope. They were looking at their subject in a way that shrank it to insignificance, compared to the big picture James saw by tinkering with different measures over longer arcs of time. … James told USA Today, 'My goal was to create a field of knowledge.' This alternative field was the outside baseball view, 'what baseball looks like if you step back from it and study it intensely and minutely, but from a distance.'"
The story, Rosen argues, isn't inside the locker room where you must have credentials to get in; it is outside the locker room.
If that is the case with the Florida Democratic primary, then Victor DiMaio and Michael Steinberg are about as far outside the locker room as humanly possible.
On Thursday afternoon last week, DiMaio and Steinberg were on the 10th floor of a downtown building, seated in an unfinished office space with bare metal strips screwed into the floor for wallboard that hadn't yet been hung.
DiMaio ran late to his own news conference because he was downstairs in his lawyer Steinberg's office, making copies of various motions in his lawsuit against the national and state Democratic parties. There was no flashy backdrop for the cameras, no multi-box to plug into audio feeds, no handlers or spinners in the hallway waiting to tell us the significance of the news conference.
DiMaio is himself a Democrat, a fixture on the Hillsborough political scene, a campaign consultant whose world centers on West Tampa and judicial races, and a member of the county Democratic Executive Committee. He sued the state and national parties because, he contends, they have robbed him and the other 4.2 million registered Democrats in Florida of the ability to make their presidential primary vote count.
DiMaio and Steinberg used the newser last week to reinforce their contention that DiMaio is "the little guy" in the fight in the wake of lots of attention being paid to Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida, who has threatened a separate lawsuit. When Nelson speaks, reporters flock and listen and editors move the story over the wires. When DiMaio speaks, reporters (rightly) don't see the same level of power, and therefore give his argument a lower level of importance. Steinberg was even asked if it wouldn't be better if Nelson were the plaintiff and higher-powered names were attached to the lawsuit.
"We don't need a senator," Steinberg said. "We need an average Democrat to be the plaintiff in this case."
Steinberg likes to cite a 1944 Texas case in which the courts ordered the state Democratic Party there to allow blacks to vote in the formerly all-white primaries. That case is Smith v. Allwright.
"Smith wasn't a congressman," Steinberg said. "Smith was just a poor black guy who they wouldn't let vote."
The national Democratic Party's system prohibits every state except Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada from holding a primary before Feb. 5. According to DiMaio and Steinberg, the party's ban has resulted in unequal treatment for Florida residents under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the "equal protection" provision adopted after the Civil War to give constitutional rights to newly freed slaves.
Florida's Republican-dominated Legislature set the stage for a showdown when it moved this state's presidential primary to Jan. 29 (albeit with the tacit help of Democrats in the Legislature who also liked the idea of enhancing Florida's role in presidential politics). State Republicans have kept relatively calm about the change, but Florida Democrats have vocally challenged the status quo.
That fight could disenfranchise Democratic voters at the national convention. Or it could result in the Democratic candidate's name not appearing on the November 2008 general election ballot in Florida.
Either of these outcomes is a longshot. And all the arguments about the case — from the DiMaio lawsuit to the Wisconsin decision that party officials wave in defense of their actions to all the backroom wrangling and unsuccessful deal-cutting — that's truly inside baseball.
The real story is not the political infighting; it's whether the controversy will have a lasting effect on Florida's Democratic voters and supporters. That is much harder to define or determine.
Some Democrats — we don't know how many just yet — are going to be upset with presidential candidates who took a pledge (at the insistence of the earlier primary states like South Carolina and Iowa) not to campaign here but are still making fundraising visits. Barack Obama, for instance, was in Tampa Sunday for two fundraisers — a day after the cutoff date demanded by the early primary states for Democrats to stop campaigning in Florida.
Some Democrats — and again, we don't have empirical data on how many — will lose confidence in their party's ability to win in November based on this fight. Some will not show up at the polls on Jan. 29 if they figure their vote won't count anyway. Many more complacently believe that this is a tempest in a teapot, because whichever candidate wins the presidential nomination can order the Florida delegates seated at the convention regardless of the party's stance today.
The view from outside the locker room, then, is one of uncertainty for Florida Democrats, something that political consultants such as DiMaio know is not a healthy starting point for any public debate or campaign.
"This whole situation is not helping," DiMaio said. "It's a mess."
This article appears in Oct 3-9, 2007.