With the recent Tuesday primaries not giving a clear winner on the Democratic side, voice are chiming again to seat the MI and Fl delegates. Howard Dean of the DNC is against the move, as MI and FL votes for the rules that effectively disqualified their delegates. There’s also increased furor about the superdelegates.
I, for one, don’t want this matter settled before the convention. I, for one, want a convention fight and multiple ballots.
I think there are very good reasons to want multiple ballots and a convention battle, publicly and in-your-face. Having multiple ballots promotes compromise, as on the second ballot delegates feel freer to vote on who they think will be the best candidate. You see a give and take between the candidates in order to woo delegates, perhaps leading to a stronger tickets (including, perhaps, the dream-team ticket, which would be one way to sway delegates). You see party elders using their role properly: as senior sages sharing their experience on what works and what doesn’t. Lastly, you make the convention fun to watch. Most recent conventions have been boo-rrr-ing… because one knows the results beforehand. In this case, there would be excitment about the convention… which will bring much more attention to the Democratic Party and its positions. Most folks don’t remember the days of exciting conventions: 1968, 1972, even 1976.
I do hope (but alas I don’t think it will be the case) that the lesson from Tuesday won’t be that negative campaigning is why Hillary succeeded. She won the primaries, basically, because not enough folks changed fast enough to the other side (combined with the Rush Limbaugh effect — he told R’s to vote for Hillary). Negative campaigning will hurt the eventual D candidate, because they are just doing the job for the other side. As I said, I hope they realize that, but I expect that they won’t. Sigh.
