Democratic panel set to resolve Clinton-Obama delegate dispute

Meeting at a Washington hotel Saturday, the party's Rules and Bylaws Committee will attempt to settle a lingering dispute about whether delegates from Michigan and Florida should be seated at the party's convention in August.

Both campaigns and thousands of voters have been lobbying the committee members, who are used to working in anonymity. E-mail messages are flooding in. The 500 tickets set aside for spectators were snapped up within three minutes on the Internet.

At stake are the 368 delegates from Michigan and Florida, who were disqualified because those states held their primaries in January, earlier than allowed by party rules. Under the outcome Hillary Rodham Clinton has called for in recent weeks, she would pick up 111 more delegates than Barack Obama. That would narrow his lead in the delegate count and might position Clinton to argue to the party's superdelegates that they should throw the nomination to her.

But there is little support on the committee for giving the New York senator everything she wants. That leaves the panel with a second challenge: bringing Clinton, Obama and Democratic officials together in an agreement that unites the party and keeps bruised feelings to a minimum.

Should Clinton or her supporters come away feeling she was treated unfairly, they may prolong their argument all the way to the convention and hesitate to get behind Obama if the Illinois senator becomes the nominee. That outcome would leave the party weakened in its general election battle against John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee.

Privately, aides to both Clinton and Obama say they prefer to see the issue settled this weekend.

A resolution would be "an important step toward our unity," said Alice Germond, secretary of the Democratic National Committee and a member of the rules panel. "We want ultimately to resolve it so we can stop talking about the process at the beginning of June and start talking about our nominee."

"We want this to be the final stop on this train," said a DNC official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We don't want to see this challenged again. That just extends the pain."