after June 3, if that's legally allowed.
Till yesterday, I've seen the nominating process as zero-sum, which it is, and linear. Does it have to be linear:
-First we run the primaries,
-then we get a nominee,
-then the nominee takes the party into the GE phase,
-if we don't have a presumptive and uncontested nominee on June 3rd, we put ourselves on hold until the convention in August?
Rachel Maddow repeatedly warns that we are almost certainly guaranteeing defeat of the Dem party unless we end the nominating phase soon. And HRC keeps signalling that she'll take the contest to the convention. People like a blogger over in HuffPo are writing that HRC has taken the party hostage.
Do we have to be hostages? Is there another way?
Suppose we ask the candidates to
* stop publicly campaigning against each other after June 3rd and
* pivot to McCain between June 3rd and the convention?
HRC could take her candidacy to the convention, as others have in the past. The candidates could put their energy and intelligence into taking on McCain. Whoever is nominated would have a leg up on the GE that I've been thinking they wouldn't have bc they'd have to wait to start the GE until late August. The candidates could cooperate in campaigning against McCain. They could tell the public that they have differences, but they could focus on the ways their respective platforms differ from McCain's and serve the nation better than his does.
Maybe we can sidestep the intraparty paralysis that we seem to be imagining if HRC doesn't concede.
In this process, party officials could make it clear that there will be some sanctions for MI and FL for holding their primaries early. Party discipline for this and future elections simply requires that. Terry McCauliffe was correct when he told Sen. Levin in a previous election that the MI delegation would not be seated if it held its primary early.
Some of HRC's demands seem like negotiating before the age of Fisher and Ury's Getting to Yes--take a firm position and hold it till the other side gives up something it really wants. It's time to let go of that kind of negotiating and move toward problem-solving that honors the interests that each side wants to protect. Seems to me that in the primary process the Dem Party wants to protect interests like
Honesty: Certainly, we want to protect honest, rather than spun, solutions. An honest solution would recognize, IMHO, that both campaigns made strategic decisions about MI and FL and accepted the party leadership's tilt toward Iowa and New Hampshire. It would recognize that both elections were a kind of acting out and that many voters knew there was an element of defiance in going to the polls.
Fairness: Comparing apples to apples. A noncontested campaign, such as FL, which favors the candidate with name recognition, doesn't pass the fairness test, IMHO. Further, some, perhaps many, voters didn't vote bc they accepted that the primary didn't count. To say that the votes of those who voted should count when others didn't vote because the primary wasn't supposed to count--that also doesn't seem quite right and fair.
Keeping covenant with the voters: Yes, we'll enforce sanctions, but we'll also use some good judgment and proportionality in selecting and enforcing them. Another covenant that has to be kept is that we don't change rules in the middle of the game and we do adhere to the metrics of winning and losing that were agree-on before the coin toss. We don't let worry about ultimately losing the GE press us into solutions that don't pass these smell tests. Instead, we find solutions that enable us to let a candidate press an apparently losing candidacy (let's frame this issue in terms of all primary elections) all the way to the convention and still allow us to put our energy into taking back the WH.
And so on.