On this Friday, a good Friday, which brings us irrevocably towards a consensus candidate in the democratic party it would be a good time to take stock of both the good, the bad, and the ugly which has arisen from this campaign season. I have waited along time to see progressives put on the brass knuckles, Chicago-style, and have at it. It has been a thrilling campaign, albeit one which I’ve watched from between closed fingers at times. That said it is time to end this farce which has the potential to undue all the good which has come out of the contest, the engaged new democrats, the reformed cynics, the energized base, the democratic leaning independents. It is clear that we will be spending that capitol if the fight drags on to the convention and the threat of a fractured party remains both real and, to me at least a surreal possibility.
So as the rules committee meets I would like to present a solution which seems to be "just" in the sense that it addresses the root cause of the problem. I did not use the word "fair" because I feel it should be reserved for the bratty partisans who will likely misuse the word when they mean to state that the decision is not in their favor.
Let us start with the fallacy of mob-think that appears to have become the fictional reality of this discourse. No actual voter has been or will be disenfranchised by either candidate. Michigan and Florida broke the rules by voting early and have forfeited their right to have their full slate of delegates seated. I think a strong argument can be made that no delegates from either state should be seated at the convention. The counter argument is that both states are vital to a democratic win in the fall and by not seating their delegates at the convention the DNC is somehow responsible if the democrats lose the state in November. This is hogwash. Voters will not stay home because they were faux-disenfranchised, that is a beltway political argument that has no basis in the reality of the actual voting public. Let us allow the politicians their reasoning, and say that in the interest of party unity a symbolic seating of the delegates should in fact occur. Here is the symbolic seating I would like to see, seat only the handful of knuckleheads who actually decided to move up the primaries, let them sit in the middle of the hundreds of empty seats that delegates their states delegates should have had. This would actual place the blame where the blame should lay, and it would certainly discourage future states from jumping the primary gun. That is not to say the primary calendar couldn’t be made more equitable but that is for another day.
No mater what agreement is hammered out by the rules committee, I hope they have the foresight to understand that the right thing to do even if all of the pledged delegates are seated at full strength, is to not allow one single superdelegate from either state to have a vote at the convention. This does two things, the first is it takes the "blame" off of the individual candidates and places it squarely on the elites from the state party who should have known better and perhaps more importantly it sends a signal to the rank and file of the democratic party that no matter what the outcome of the primary or general election is the elimination of the superdelegate component of the primary process will be the first priority of the DNC.