Florida, Michigan cannot save Clinton

Just as Democrats across the country have been divided over which candidate would make the better nominee, most of the panel members also bring personal preferences to the table.

Many are long-standing party officials with close ties to the Clintons. The former first lady has 13 members publicly supporting her, including campaign advisers Harold Ickes and Tina Flournoy who are working to build her delegate count. Eight are openly aligned with Obama. Nine others are officially undeclared.

"We have to have delegates, and they have to be delegations that reflect the opinions of those two states," said former DNC Chairman Don Fowler, a committee member supporting Clinton. "How we get there is very different because everyone sees these questions of who it helps and who it hurts. I don't think the formulation has been found that will get around the piece at this point." But he said a solution is probably possible among the diverse interests.

Because Obama is in the lead for the nomination, his camp heads into the meeting in a position of strength. It is possible the Illinois senator could clinch the nomination by the time the panel meets if he picks up the pace of superdelegate endorsements in the coming weeks.

But Obama has such a lead that he may be able to afford to be generous and give Clinton most of the delegates. That would help put the issue behind them and help him build goodwill in Michigan and Florida heading into the November election.

Still, some think the fairest solution is to disregard the primary votes and split the delegations evenly between the two candidates. Yvonne Gates, a member of Nevada who said she is keeping her candidate preference private until after the meeting so her decision won't be questioned, said she isn't sure what position she would support at the meeting but that it must be fair to both candidates.

"My definition is a 50-50 split is something that is fair," she said. "It cannot be a situation where you give one candidate more votes than the other. In my opinion that wasn't an election when they didn't have a chance to get out and talk to the people of that community."

It's also possible that any vote that recognizes the Michigan and Florida results would legitimize their elections. Clinton has been arguing that she leads in the popular vote, but that's only when both states are included and it is very slim -fewer than 5,000 votes out of 34 million cast.

Her accounting also doesn't include some caucus states that favored Obama and where the popular vote wasn't tallied. The measure of winning the nomination is not the popular vote but whoever can get the majority of delegates -currently 2,026 are needed for the nomination although adding Michigan and Florida back in would change the threshold.

Obama climbed to 1,904 on Friday, according to The Associated Press count. Clinton has 1,719 delegates and is trying to use the popular vote argument to win over more.