Brokeback Convention

“Oh, why can’t I quit you?”

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/convention08.htm
03/06/08

One of the problems about writing about the primaries that were held Tuesday is that virtually everyone has the same take on it. Hillary Clinton won three out of four, which shows that her campaign is quite alive. However, she only gained a handful of delegates and still trails Obama by 110 with only 800 or so to be picked up in the primary and caucus process. But then, there are the superdelegates....

Well, if you pay any attention to politics at all, you’ve heard all of it. Obama’s leading, except that Hillary’s leading. Hillary should quit the race, except Obama should quit the race.

Oh, and gleeful Republicans and frightened Democrats are predicting that the race will divide and splinter the party, and this will pit women against African Americans (the Democratic version) or it will pit large, greasy Amazons with copious pubic hair and steel-cone breastplates against howling savages with bones in their noses (the Republican version).

And a lot of the people who wanted the process to be Democratic are now whining loudly because by apportioning the Delegates by voting percentage instead of winner-take-all for each state, Democrats got a more democratic process.

I think a lot of people have forgotten that a democratic process tends to be loud, messy, inconvenient and, when the stakes are high, people get red in the face and shout at each other. It’s SUPPOSED to work that way.

The Republican primaries were nice and safe and about as sanitary as you’re ever going to get from that lot. John McCain built an insurmountable lead, getting an aggregate vote total that both in terms of raw numbers and in terms of percentage of votes cast by Republicans badly trailed either Hillary or Obama. I actually had one Republican sneer that Democrats who were upset that the race was inconclusive and the candidates were still battling “hated Democracy” and when I pointed out the essentially undemocratic nature of the GOP primaries, he just sort of shut up and went away.

But he had a point. People who are upset that the race is still going on may not hate democracy, but they’ve forgotten why people at large used to care about politics, and why they don’t any more.

Suppose that when the Democratic convention rolls around, we all still have no idea which of the two is the winner. At this point, that seems quite likely. Technically, Obama could win it outright without any superdelegates by getting 97% of the vote in each of the remaining scheduled primaries. With the present breakdown in pledged superdelegates, Obama would need to sweep the remaining primaries with vote counts running 65-35 in his favor, and Hillary would need nearly 75-25 stompings, and that just isn’t in the cards. At this juncture, I suspect that Obama will show up at the convention with about 1,625 delegates, and Hillary would have about 1,525. That’s assuming they break even on the primaries from here out, and that Michigan and Florida don’t have caucus “do-overs” in accordances with party rules that will allow their delegates to be counted.

So it’s going to the convention.

You don’t think people will be WATCHING?

Party managers love the conventions, because it is effectively a four-day infomercial for their respective parties. But since 1980, they’ve all been cut-and-dried, with virtually no drama, and very little voter interest. The major networks stopped bothering with them twenty years ago, a big change from the 50s and 60s when there was gavel-to-gavel coverage.

The Republican convention will elicit a huge yawn, even from the party faithful. By the time that rolls around, McCain will have selected his running mate, there will be a perfunctory vote on the party platform, which as always will be to the right of the Italian fascist party, and nobody will be watching unless Jon Stewart is covering it.

After the Democratic convention, the Republicans will be busy just reminding people that they have a candidate, too.

Everyone’s scared to death of a brokered convention, partly because brokered conventions usually mean losing the general election, and partly because everyone envisions Democrats falling to the level of Republican fantasies and staging a civil war, like Chicago in 1968.

That isn’t going to happen. For one thing, both Clinton and Obama are intelligent people, and smart politicians. They are going to kiss and make up once the voting is done, and urge their followers to do the same. And, with tens of millions of Americans watching, they are both going to make career-climax speeches and rally their followers to a common cause. There’s already rumors of a ticket with the loser as the VP choice, which would be a moderate’s dream. (As a liberal, I would prefer to see someone like Edwards or Boxer to give the ticket some balance).

But there isn’t going to be a civil war among Democrats, no matter how hard fought the rest of the primary season is. People are just too aware of the stakes.

Nor will the Democrats be on the defensive after the convention. For one thing, the right wing smear machine doesn’t really know who to fire at, and is wasting at least half their ammunition on someone who won’t be the candidate. That defrays their message. For another, the Republicans have the albatross of Putsch and his failed presidency (and no matter who McCain’s running mate is, Democrats will work hard to create the impression that he’s running with Putsch).

Finally, there is something else to consider: the last time the Democrats had a REAL brokered convention was 76 years earlier. They went on to win the general election by a large margin, sweeping on to control of the House and Senate. And they kept the White House and both houses of Congress for the next 20 years.

As the economy continues to tank and conditions for working people rapidly worsen, America in 2008 is looking more and more like the America of 1932, and if party managers were frightened and desperate then, the voters were much more so.

So don’t worry about the knock-down drag out fight that Obama and Clinton may well have. That’ll pass, and then Democrats will join together to try to save the country. That’s what happened in 1932, and that’s what will happen now.