Long Train (Wreck) Running
Ruth Marcus points out that the pending train wreck that is the Democratic nominating process is actually overdue for a crash. It is also, ironically, the fault of one of Clinton's advisors.
The wonder, really, is that the nomination train wreck confronting the Democratic Party didn't happen years earlier.
The stage was set for the current stalemate over five marathon days of negotiations in June 1988. In the fifth-floor conference room of a Washington law firm, representatives of Michael Dukakis, the party's nominee, and Jesse Jackson, his unsuccessful challenger, hashed out a new set of delegate selection rules.
Jackson felt aggrieved that he had not amassed as many delegates as his popular vote total would have suggested. In the 1984 primary campaign, for instance, Jackson won 19 percent of the popular vote but received just 10 percent of the delegates. So Jackson's rules guru, Harold M. Ickes, insisted on adopting proportional representation rules that would award insurgent candidates a bigger share of delegates in future contests.
Twenty years later, the rules Ickes advocated seem to be working against his current candidate, Hillary Clinton, reducing the impact of her wins in delegate-rich states such as California, New York and New Jersey. But Clinton could be saved by an unintended consequence of the move to proportional representation: Because the system tends to produce a stalemate between two strong candidates, it ends up supersizing the role of party pooh-bahs known as superdelegates.
All this was predicted long ago by Tad Devine, the Democratic Party operative who represented Dukakis in the rules negotiations. In a prescient 1991 article, Devine and Anthony Corrado explained the paradox:
"The move to strict proportional representation, which was adopted to ensure that delegate outcomes would better reflect the will of the electorate," they wrote, may instead "have produced a system in which party leaders and elected officials will hold the balance of power in determining the outcome of nomination contests."
Marcus has the details of just how bizarre the rules are. They virtually ensure a feel good, everybody wins scenario but are fairly useless when two closely matched candidates are running for the same spot. If the party does fracture over this there will be some changes. (After all, the horse will be gone and the barn burned to the ground - perfect time to close the door.) It might not happen, though, at the rate Hillary is losing races. The party may simply have to step in and force her to step aside. (And wouldn't that be entertaining.)
By Mockinbird, Wednesday, 13 February , 2008 @ 4:15 pm
Gaius, you tell Hillary Clinton to step aside. I’ll watch.