Let's get this settled, boys and girls

It takes 2,025 delegates to win the Democratic nomination for president. As of today, according to the paper of record, Obama has 1,620 delegates to Clinton's 1,471.5 (I'd love to know more about that half-delegate!). Respectively, that amounts to 80% and 73% of the total needed to win. Only ten states and territories have yet to hold their primaries, caucuses, or other nominating contests, and those states and territories control 689 additional delegates between them.

If either Obama or Clinton can manage to sew up most of those delegates (Obama would need roughly 60% of the remaining delegates; Clinton, 80%) s/he would have enough to win the nomination outright and avoid a brokered convention. Neither candidate seems likely to achieve the necessary level of success. Even if either candidate could do so, the primary calendar doesn't run out until June 3--or four full months after Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Tuesday, whose whole purpose was supposed to be avoiding exactly this kind of protracted nominating contest. The actual nominating convention isn't until the end of the summer (August 25-28).

I no longer have a horse in this race: it really doesn't matter all that much to me who wins the nod to be the Democrats' nominee for president, because I will be holding my nose and fighting down the bile rising in the back of my throat when I have to step into the voting booth in November and cast a ballot for either Clinton or Obama. The punditocracy and the blogosphere notwithstanding, the American people seem to think that either candidate would do at least an OK job as president. They certainly don't seem eager to choose one over the other, given that the race is effectively in a statistical dead heat.

It may be due in part to the peculiar circumstances of my life (and the lives of a lot of the people I talk to on a regular basis), but I'm thoroughly sick of this never-ending snarking and sniping--and even more thoroughly sick of the way the media fawns over all the candidates in the race (when they are not attempting to anoint one or the other of them as the "frontrunner," the better to serve their preferred horse-race model of story)--and wastes virtually all of its time analyzing the mind-numbingly boring minutiae of whose surrogate said what allegedly nasty thing about which candidate today. It is true that the media's focus on the ongoing Democratic contest makes it harder for John McCain, the Republican nominee, to get much attention. But it is not clear to me that lack of attention is necessarily a bad thing for McCain, who has to do an awful lot of fence-mending with conservative voters who are, to say the least, highly skeptical about his candidacy and his ability to represent them and their concerns. It may well be to McCain's advantage to be able to do some of the necessary ass-kissing out of the glare of the cameras. It also makes it easier for him to focus on raising more money and building up his support (and doing what he can for down-ticket Republicans, most of whom are likely quaking in their boots at the thought of what is likely to happen to them on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November).

Consequently, I would like very much to see our two remaining contenders (or at least their staffers) sit down together and have some serious conversations about finding a way of accelerating the process of selecting our nominee--so that we will not be limping into the general after having had to fight a bruising primary all the way through the summer (and possibly waiting for the result of a brokered convention). Because while it seems fairly clear that Democratic voters like both Obama and Clinton roughly equally, both the Obama and the Clinton camps contain quite a few, shall we say, hyper-partisan supporters who have sworn upon veritable stacks of Bibles that they will never, ever, ever vote for that candidate. And that's definitely to McCain's advantage and the Republicans'. We've got to get behind whichever one of our two candidates winds up being the nominee--and we're going to need to allow some time for that to happen, given the passions that have characterized this election season.

So let's start the healing process sooner rather than later, eh? Bury the hatchet now, pick a slate of candidates, and let's get people used to thinking about them as "our" nominees--not as "my guy/gal and that candidate." We could use some time to fund-raise ourselves, and I'm quite sure that down-ticket Democrats would be quite happy at the prospects of having our presidential slate with some time to help them raise funds and raise their profiles in their respective districts.

I don't much care who gets which slot. But I would very much like to be able to stop worrying about when we're going to come to a decision on that question. And even more so having to wake up virtually every morning to yet another edition of "Inside Politics." Kiss and make up already, would'ja?

Comments

[Incertus (Brian)]

I've started to tune it out really, largely because I've come to the conclusion that unless Obama has a Spitzer-quality skeleton that neither the Republicans nor the Clinton oppo people have dug out (and they're some of the best in the business), he's got this thing sewn up, no matter what happens in Pennsylvania.

But I'll vote for either of them, and with considerably less bile in my throat than I had when I voted for Kerry in 2004.

[upyernoz]

I'd love to know more about that half-delegate!

the reason for that is the democrats abroad primary. democrats abroad get to send 16 pledged delegates to the convention, but each delegate gets only a 1/2 vote (i.e. DAs have a total of 8 delegate-votes). the vote was last month as split 65.6%-32.7% in favor of obama (with the remaining 1.7% distributed among some of the other candidates that have dropped out). that translates to 3 delegate-votes for obama (i.e. 6 individual delegates, each with a half-vote) and 1.5 for clinton. another 2.5 delegate-votes will be allocated at the democrats abroad convention next month.

DA also get 4 superdelegates, each also with a half vote.