I am looking forward to my vote in a primary actually mattering. It will be the first time in my voting life. I think the pundits (sorry but you are one too) want a resolution now for their own reasons. But it's not about you. A lot of democrats are excited to participate in deciding in a substantive way who will be the candidate.

I want this to be over more than anyone, but if I wasn't already in Obama's camp (via Edwards), I'd still be rooting for Obama if only to see Taylor Marsh's head explode.

Maybe when Obama wins, Taylor and her followers can catch a ride on Hale-Bopp.

Wel, in my guise as a pundit, this is great for traffic, media appearances, etc. In my guise as a progressive, and as someone who watches the comments of this and other blogs, I worry about how ugly it's getting.

The evidence is that it's pretty well contained in the blagotubes and among hyper-serious activists.

I'm certain a food fight between Dean and another candidate that lasted through the primary season would have been worse.

I think also the compressed followed by uncompressed schedule makes things feel weirdly long. If it was Iowa, then three weeks, then New Hampshire, then four weeks, then a few states, then two weeks, then a few more states, etc. etc., people would feel differently.

Today, in particulary, sucked harder than most days.

If the first primary in January 3rd, the last one should be no later than March.

This ugliness is a Clinton phenomenon. In Iowa's tight race, did Edwards say his opponents were unqualified to be president?

Oh hush up. We still don't need an election decided by crotchety snowbound seniors and corn subsidized farmers, almost all of them white, in both cases. No NH and IA, all is not forgiven. And frankly, part of the reason we're in this mess is because of you and your silly ruyles about going first. A better answer: let's not make that mistake again.

Well, it means that there's a fairly high chance of it going on to NC (in May!) and all corners of the state getting visits from both candidates.

I think also the compressed followed by uncompressed schedule makes things feel weirdly long.

It's not just that. It's the numbers game. Both campaigns and their supporters are basically in a position where nothing numerical and electoral that happens between now and the convention changes the game.

This is an Iraq occupation primary. Can't stay, can't get out.

Which means that any gains in momentum come from spinning the few results in the next six weeks, but mostly from the horserace grind, the squabbles and whines over MI/FL, the staging and framing of whatever debates come between now and late April, and the attendant dirt-flinging.

In actuality, the mess is because the rules were lousy this year.

By putting so many delegates up for grabs so early in the process, the Tsunami Tuesday math encouraged a WWI style stalemate.

Now we have one candidate - Clinton - as the clear majority choice of the Party for the nomination, and another candidate - Obama - with a delegate lead.

Rules matter, and the rules were lousy this year.

I want this to be over more than anyone, but if I wasn't already in Obama's camp (via Edwards), I'd still be rooting for Obama if only to see Taylor Marsh's head explode.

It's funny, I feel almost exactly the same way about Clinton (and arrived via Edwards, to boot) but the object of my head exploding fantasy is Andrew Sullivan.

Wanna hear something fun?

Every single election from now until eternity will unfold exactly like this if the process is not changed.

The Republicans will pick a candidate relatively quickly and two or more Democrats will end up slogging through to the convention to have their differences settled by the superdelegates.

All thanks to those who wanted proportional representation. It's simply impossible for a candidate to run away and hide if a rival can raise enough funds to keep his or her campaign going.

What's amusing is that the main reason the Democrats have fallen into this trap is that the country is so sick of the Republicans that people everywhere started stuffing the pockets of any Democrat who looked like he or she might win. With enough money to keep running through to the convention, Obama and Clinton ensured a protracted battle.

The same thing will happen in 2012, since everyone will try to build a base of supporters the way Dean and Obama did. Unless the Democrats fall into such disrepute that no one is willing to support any of them, that campaign will be a rerun of this one.

Better get it right this time...otherwise it will be a long century.

Now we have one candidate - Clinton - as the clear majority choice of the Party for the nomination

Where 'majority' is defined in the racial sense.

If you're going to troll, Petey, do it on a Monday morning.

"Where 'majority' is defined in the racial sense."

Feel free to go sleazy, pseudonymous in nc.

But that doesn't change the fact that Clinton has a clear lead in popular votes among Democrats cast so far, and that she has a clear lead in national polls among Democrats going forward.

I dunno. The sanctimonious whining about how nasty the sides have gotten is at least as annoying to me as the nastiness of the sides.

The ugliness IS a Clinton phenomenon. Their reputation as "polarizing" figures has been well earned. The demands for apologies, the threats to fire people, the plank walking by people who dare, dare to speak negatively of her highness -- all a result of Mrs. Clinton being one of the two contenders. Do you think for a minute if the survivors had been Obama and Edwards the tone would have been like this?

Let's make it better in 2012. My suggestions:

1)Debates begin in mid-January, run by League of Women Voters
2)IA and NH can go first, I don't care, but next round of primaries to start within 1 week of IA, NH.
3)Split up the Super Tuesday states into 2 weeks.
4)Finish all primaries by end of March.
5) No caucuses - these are driven by peer pressure and are not accessible for many voters.
6) Closed primaries - if you want to vote Dem, register.
7) Simple proportional awarding of delegates, instead of the nonsensical systems like Texas.

Um, Petey...

Obama leads the popular vote even with Florida. Clinton only takes a (tiny) lead if you count the Michigan results, a contest in which Obama wasn't even on the ballot. There, his supporters cast their votes for "uncommitted" -- which most popular vote counts don't include in Obama's total.

And the Real Clear Politics polling average for national preferences? Obama ahead by 1.2 points (46.2 to 45).

"Let's make it better in 2012. My suggestions:

1)Debates begin in mid-January, run by League of Women Voters
2)IA and NH can go first, I don't care, but next round of primaries to start within 1 week of IA, NH.
3)Split up the Super Tuesday states into 2 weeks.
4)Finish all primaries by end of March.
5) No caucuses - these are driven by peer pressure and are not accessible for many voters.
6) Closed primaries - if you want to vote Dem, register.
7) Simple proportional awarding of delegates, instead of the nonsensical systems like Texas."

They definitely need to shorten the season, but I would actually recommend pushing it back in the year about four or five months. Have Iowa and New Hampshire go around the beginning of May and wrap it up by convention time in August. Otherwise what's happening now in the Democratic primary would simply move over to the actual election - endless bickering over policy points when no one really knows what the economy or anything else will look like at election time.

There are actually some problems with closing off the primaries. Many independents will stop bothering to concern themselves with the merits of the candidates and the candidates will stop concerning themselves with their ability to draw in non-Democratic voters. There are many areas in the country where a Democraticish voter would have better luck trying to defeat a particularly awful Republican in the primary rather than hope a Democratic candidate can win in the election. Should those people (having registered as a Republican) be barred from the Democratic primary in a different election?

Concerning Texas - agreed.

"but I would actually recommend pushing it back in the year about four or five months. Have Iowa and New Hampshire go around the beginning of May and wrap it up by convention time in August."

Great idea! The momentum from the primaries flows right to the convention and then quickly into the GE.
This year with debates last fall and primaries going forever, people just get burned out.

Ezra, if anything, you should be flogging New Hampshire for its failure to support Obama, thus keeping Clinton in the race and dragging this process out.

Though the other mechanism at fault is the Democrats' proportional awarding of delegates. I'm sure this sounded wonderfully fair and egalitarian when they came up with the idea, but all it does is blunt the impact of victories and motivate fringe candidates to run in the hopes of bringing a few delegates to the convention.

"Clinton only takes a (tiny) lead if you count the Michigan results,"

Clinton not only already has a small lead in the overall popular vote, which should expand in future contests, but she has a substantial lead among Democratic popular votes.

Considering that Obama's delegate edge only comes from caucus delegates, the will of Democratic voters is not to be ignored.

"And the Real Clear Politics polling average for national preferences?"

RCP includes numerous older polls in their average.

Both of the big tracking polls, Gallup and Rasmussen, show Clinton with a lead over Obama. It's 4 points in Gallup and 6 points in Rasmussen.

Sleazy?

Since you obviously weren't using the term 'majority' to mean 'most', we're left with the other definitions.

Go grift some pennies, instead of playing high-school mass debater.

Ezra, you worry too much. The partisanship demonstrated on the Internet is being perpetrated by a minority of the electorate and by a minority of activists. The divisiveness of this campaign is not nearly as widespread or deep-seated as the vocal minority indicates.

Digital and traditional media are an echo chamber exaggerating the impact of that minority exponentially disproportionate fashion to the reality.

The fact that 80-90% of Democrats are willing to vote for either candidate is proof enough.

I've discussed with friends alternative primary scenarios. I like the extended primary season, but I would like to see each event spaced more evenly. This way, candidates would likely visit more states personally presenting their ideas to the voters. Super Tuesday drove me nuts! Too many states, too little time. And the drive of many states to schedule primaries earlier and earlier is just wrong.

Food for thought.

LoL, People who think this won't cost us the election are fools. Polls that show that most Dems will vote for either candidate mostly assume a clean election. Many of them were taken before things started to go south, and many of Obama's supporters are registered as Independent.

Most people don't even know that Hillary will try to steal this election. If she does so, do you really think the media won't spend the entire election season reminding voters that while Hillary is a vote rigging monster, John McCain is a straight-talking saint? If you think that isn't going to make Hillary radioactive to independents and Dem-leaners, you're kidding yourselves.

Which means that any gains in momentum come from...

What's interesting is that, unlike any other primary season in our lifetimes, "momentum" doesn't mean anything anymore. Gaining it, losing it…doesn’t matter now, too many votes have already been cast.

It's sort of like California reporting at midnight that they're going for the Republican, after the networks announced at 11 that the Democrat has 270 votes from earlier time zones. Winning California doesn't give the Republican momentum, because there's nowhere to go!

Prior to this year, the way the process worked was that voters started picking one candidate over another (or two or three others). As later states' voting reinforced that pattern, candidates took note and dropped out. We called that “momentum.”

What made the process legitimate was that even though not every one voted, it was fundamentally guided by voters. You didn't become the presumptive nominee by losing, you did it by winning, and pressure to drop out wasn't put on those who were winning the votes, it was put on those who were losing the votes.

This year we're in a weird situation. We're going to have elections for delegates, and at the end of these elections, Obama will have won more delegates, as well as more votes. Nothing will change that math.

Normally, the other candidate would drop out at this point.

But instead, the candidate who is going to lose is suggesting that it doesn’t matter that the voters didn’t vote for her because at this moment she has "momentum" (defined as a week of good press and the ability to still raise about half as much money as her opponent).

Her argument is that because of this "momentum" we should do weird things so she can win.

Clinton is demanding the convention seat a delegation where her opponent wasn't on the ballot. She's demanding they seat the Florida delegation after agreeing they should not be seated (a flip-flop that’s logically incoherent). And, perhaps most un-precedented, she's asking superdelegates to override the vote results.

And even worse, she's suggesting that the elections her opponent won are somehow illegitimate--while demanding we accept the results of at least one election that clearly was illegitimate.

Suggesting the process is illegitimate is a VERY dangerous thing to suggest in a democracy. This kind of talk simply should not be tolerated from a politician who is losing in a competitive race. And it should especially not be tolerated when, after the candidate's husband won under those same rules 16 years prior, she and her husband did not complain about their legitimacy or use their position as party leader to fix them.

The primary process was always horribly flawed as a technical process. This should come as news to no one in the Democratic party.

Prior to this year, what made it work--what gave it legitimacy--was that we all agreed the person who won the nomination was the one who more people were voting for.

I don't see why we should throw that legitimacy away, and override the popular vote AND the pledged delegate win just to give Clinton the nomination. (And, on a purely tactical note, I also don't see why we should reward someone with the nomination who didn't know how to win over the voters she needed in order to get it.)

We're going to have elections for delegates, and at the end of these elections, Obama will have won more delegates, as well as more votes. Nothing will change that math.

well, considering that we haven't actually had elections in a number of states yet, we might want to wait before confidently asserting voter totals; I agree the delegate totals for committed delegates will likely show Obama with a slight lead. However, the point was, and remains, that at the end of the primaries and caucuses, neither candidate will have the necessary number of committed delegates to claim total victory. At which point, we turn to superdelegates, and we discuss what's good for the party (my own take: not superdelegates). If it remains closely tied, with both candidates doing about evenly, as they have been for most of this, then we have a difficult discussion. If Obama pulls ahead, no problem, If Clinton pulls ahead in the upcoming races, I'd also say... no problem, though I expect an Obama supporter would see it differently.

Look, I get the tensions are high and people disagree, strongly, about this stuff. But we're not done and neither side has made enough of case for the other to give up and get out; it's likely this will run all the way to the end, and probably need to be settled at the convention. If you can't live with that, and you plan to get angry anytime a Clinton supporter says we need to have a "wait and see" posture, feel free. But it's probably not going to make your case stronger, better, or righter. At the end, we'll see where we are, and we'll have to find a solution everyone can live with it. Threats of "burning down Denver" or "blowing up the party" make nice theater. It really doesn't need to come to that.

I'll go ahead and commit heresy by saying that I'm an Obama supporter, but if Clinton winds up winning the nomination, I will vote for her. It's a no-brainer. I simply prefer Obama because I feel that his unique set of skills suits him well to get out in front and build public support for policies (aka using the bully pulpit) while Clinton seems well suited to the actual dirty business of legislating, building coalitions, and negotiating as needed. I don't see either one as serving some sort of a "lesser" role as a senator unless they choose to sit on the sidelines most of the time. That's all.

I'm also a registered independent, but I always (well, at least for the past decade that I've been able to vote) vote for Democrats. I might as well be a Democrat and have given money to the DNC, but I don't register as a Democrat. Why? I don't see myself as fitting neatly into one hole or another. I don't get worked up about some of the same things as Democrats do because I don't see them as being effective enough towards the ultimate goals to justify getting worked up over. But it is good for me to be able to vote in the Dem primary. There are others a little further to the right of me, who ultimately could be persuaded in either direction and if there happens to be a candidate in the general that they already approved of during the primaries, all the better. The Dem candidates' policy positions don't have much daylight between them, after all, and it would be nice to have political capital to spend resulting from a decisive victory rather than a slim majority.

Let's get something clear here. The whole reason there are two major parties with opposing platforms is so they can have organizational and fundraising capabilities that would not be possible in a different system. That's just what developed in America. A lot of the primary feuding is akin to that of fans for sports teams, and emotions get high. But when all's done, the focus will shift to the next season. With the exception of the whole FL/MI debacle, I don't see an inherent problem with the primary process. It just so happens that it is a very close competition and people who follow it closely are getting a bit fatigued, or looking for reasons why it shouldn't be so close-- once again, like sports fans complaining about an iffy penalty or foul that may have changed the course of the game. Get over it!

Most people don't even know that Hillary will try to steal this election.

Despite the negativity, such as the 3AM ad, Clinton and Obama combined still drew more voters in a TX primary than Kerry did in the 2004 general election. I think we're fine.

well, the petulance I don't understand is obama-supporters who claim if hillary mcclinton takes the nomination, they'll vote for mccain.

I think mcclinton's awful and deserves every heaping of criticism that she's put self before party (a congenital clinton trait, historically).

I'm an obama guy. I want to see hillary lose the primary and lose in the most humiliating way possible. maybe then we can stop relitigating baby-boomer angst every 4 years. enough with the clintons and dynastic politics.

that said, I'd never vote for mccain. that's not a protest vote; that's progressive suicide.

mencken, some Clinton supporters say if Obama wins they, too, will leave the party. It's hardly one-sided.

But it's also not wide-spread at all.

This is a tea party compared to 1968.

joel hanes is right, and a little historical perspective might be nice. No one's getting gassed or billy-clubbed, so take a powder, Ezra. While I'm sure his elite friends would prefer something tidier and more aesthetically pleasing, I like my democracy messy because it actually kina captures the messiness and complexity of everybody's lives. Suck it up and embrace the people's rule, dude!

Andrew, There's a difference between not caring who wins the Democratic Nomination, and not caring whether the person who wins BECOMES the nominee.

Currently, 43% of the party wants the loser to concede, 42% think the SD's should pick who wins. 38% think that if the SD's end up deciding, they should go with the popular vote winner. 42% think they should just decide by whoever they believe to be most qualified.

Even under the Hypothetical assumption that the SD's are going to decide the winner, only a few % back down from believing the delegate leader should win. 38% is a lot of people. These numbers show the potential for a whole lot of division. This is what I mean by 'most Democrats don't know Hillary plans on stealing the nomination.'. This battle hasn't even started with most of them, and they are already divided. What's 3 months of political advertising on both sides going to do?

I'm not sure you realize this, but you need about 85-90% of the party to have an honest shot at winning. 'Most' isn't going to cut it.

All figures taken from the Newsweek/PSRAI Poll (03/07/08).

Lol, 68 wasn't very messy at this time either...

I'd really caution against comparing pre-primary races to post-primary races. Races where people can vote and participate will engender much stronger feelings compared to races where everyone assumes from the beginning are going to be back-room affairs. IF this race isn't decided by then, I'd expect some fairly large protests to take place. That having been said, the Denver PD isn't lead by a Clinton loyalist and it's very unlikely they'll be attacking any protesters this time out.

Well, minus the whole assassination thing. But we're not really in an age of assassinations at the moment and that wasn't ever really in the cards this time. Given the issues involved, it's hard to say that was politically motivated in the sense meant here. Sirhan Sirhan wasn't exactly a McCarthy or Humprhey Booster.

And yes, I know Kennedy's people and McCarthy/McGovern's people hated each-other, but that's not what most people mean when they talk about the divisions surrounding the 68 race, though it is unlikely those later divisions would have mattered without these earlier ones.

I'm not sure you realize this, but you need about 85-90% of the party to have an honest shot at winning. 'Most' isn't going to cut it.

Anonymous response to soullite above was me.