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Florida II: Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back in the Water

Well, I woke up this morning, switched on my computer, read the headlines, and suddenly had a nightmare vision of Denver-Democratic-Convention-as-Florida-in-2000: a political horror show in which two candidates are running neck and neck, both sides are lining up their lawyers, legal scholars are looking for decades-old precedents, pundits are howling, and no one knows how to resolve the dispute because this sort of thing hasn't happened for a century or more.

That nightmare would be bad for the candidates, bad for the Democratic Party, bad for the political process, bad for the country. It might even be bad for John McCain, since if he won, in the wake of a Democratic Party meltdown, his victory would be suspect, too. Democracy only works when an election is held according to a set of rules which most people in a given society agree to abide by in advance, even when they don't like the result. That advance agreement is what then confers legitimacy on the winner, who is accepted by the losing side because he won fair and square. But when the rules suddenly become unclear, as they did in 2000, and the victor has to be chosen according to some other, ad hoc, previously untested procedure, as in 2000, the winner will inevitably be considered illegitimate by some part of the population.

And—let's face it—no candidate chosen after a rowdy, chaotic, confusing August convention will be considered legitimate by all Democrats, and may not be considered a legitimate presidential candidate by the general public, either. What are superdelegates, after all? Why haven't we ever talked about them before? Why did the Democratic Party impose proportional representation, the worst voting system known to man, on its candidate selection process? Why exactly don't the Florida and Michigan votes count? Should they be held again, as the Detroit Free Press says today? None of these questions can be resolved, post facto, and since they haven't come up before, or at least not in living memory, no one knows how to resolve them in advance.

Maybe some smooth, establishment thing will now happen, either Hillary or Obama will be gently induced to step down, and the Democrats will move on to do battle with McCain, secure that their candidate is the right one. And if not? Time to start playing the creepy horror movie music, since the scary shark scenes are approaching fast ...