Bring It To An End

I am generally not a fan of people in the media writing off candidates' chances of election.  One of the things that has fascinated me about this election so far is how journalists think it part of their job description to predict events, and to determine who is and isn't a "serious" candidate.  You would think the actual voters were beside the point. 

We've reached an interesting juncture, though, where the media's interest in maintaining the image of an extremely competitive race is probably obscuring rather than illuminating things.  This story does a good job of explaining some of the reasons why this is.  (One thing you never see mentioned, though: If you're covering a candidate for a national outlet and he/she wins, you have a good shot at a coveted White House correspondent gig when that person takes office.  I view this as an incentive most reporters manage to ignore, some so magnificently that they're practically knee-capping their candidates, but it exists.)

Still, declaring who will and won't win is tricky business.  So instead of buying into today's meme that everyone should declare the Clinton candidacy dead, I'm going to suggest folks who missed it take a look at Phil Bredesen's proposal in the Times two days ago to schedule a superdelegate primary that can hopefully bring this thing to a close.  He says it should happen in June; I don't see a problem with it happening earlier.  And I say this as someone who was hoping the media would stop treating the primary season as something that could be wrapped up in a few weeks.  (They never really did stop treating it this way, but through a mixture of their incompetence at predicting events, and those fickle voters, things didn't shape up very clearly.)  I don't buy the argument that a drawn out nomination process won't hurt the Democratic party, and all I see are the Democratic candidates -- almost always Clinton -- making extremely problematic arguments about each other that may not be cited in a general election but undoubtedly play into and sustain themes that the Republican party will be pushing this fall.  It really is time to wind this thing down.

P.S. I know Bredesen did this, which was awful. I still like the idea of a superdelegate primary. 

Comments

[low-tech cyclist]

Totally off-topic, I just have to point out that today's XKCD was one of the classics.

[Crissa]

I think it seems ironic that Clinton is supporting these efforts to push the primary along and Obama isn't. Especially when most of these will actually hurt Clinton more (by standard risk assessment).

But this is showing one of the things I find distressing about Obama is how fast he is to say something - but slow to actually do anything different and new.

[low-tech cyclist]

Now that there's video of Hillary being welcomed in Bosnia, I wonder if Hillary's continuing to lie about the sniper fire and all, even after being contradicted by many others including Sinbad, will become a major issue.

It damned well should. This is the sort of thing that would kill most political candidacies.

It's too late for her to say, "I guess I misremembered" - the time for that was when she was first contradicted, a couple of weeks ago now. But she was contradicted by other eyewitnesses, yet continued to assert her version after she should have checked to make sure she was on solid ground. Now she's been spreading a false story to make her look more serious than she was, in the face of the knowledge that it might well be false.

[Ron]

Really there's no need for a superdelegate primary at a specific date. All that is required is for the superdelegates to look at the kind of campaigns the two candidates are running, look at the probable coattails for Congressional and state legislative offices the two candidates will have, and then announce their decision. This shouldn't be a hard decision. Hopefully Richardson's endorsement will give the others cover to make their move.

[El Cid]

Strangely enough, when I take a step back these days, given the short memory of the American public, I don't think the current months of Democratic divisiveness will play as big a role in the general election as many seem to think.

As a matter of intuition, the compressed time period of the general campaign of Democrats AGAINST Republicans may be more to the public's liking, rather than a super-long drawn out Republican / Democrat battle.