Griper Blade: Campaign of the Living Dead

Welcome to what is very likely to be the screwiest Democratic primary process of your life. You've got the undemocratic superdelegates, you've got the incredibly boneheaded "Texas Two-Step" -- which is, as we speak, poised to give the majority of that state's delegates to Barack Obama -- and you've got disenfranchised voters in Michigan and Florida. The nomination process is a well-oiled machine that's designed to screw everything up.

There's been a lot of worrying that an extended Clinton-Obama battle will harm the party, but a much more realistic concern is that voters will look at the process and decide the Democrats couldn't run an Appleby's, let alone a nation. Turns out the whole thing works great, but only so long as there's a clear frontrunner pretty early out. If it stays close after that, then the whole thing gets more stupid and poorly thought out as the race goes on. Florida's butterfly ballots in 2000 are starting to look like a comparatively better problem to have.

Fair or not, the unseated delegates from Florida and Michigan have become an untapped resource. Hillary Clinton needs them to have any chance in hell and her camp wants them seated as is. In Michigan, at least, this would be tremendously unfair, since Clinton was the only top-tier candidate on the ballot. Team Clinton can't like the idea of a "do-over," since Michigan's demographics favor Obama. Voters in the Democratic primary there were given a choice between Clinton, Dodd, Kucinich, and "uncommitted" -- uncommitted won 40% of the vote. Despite having no real competition in that state, Hillary took a slim majority of 55%. The idea that all Obama voters in Michigan went to the polls and voted for no one -- in an election that wasn't going to count anyway -- is insane. No one can seriously say that a significant percentage didn't just say, "Screw it," and stay home...

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