How on God's green earth is the Democratic attempt to apportion delegates proportionally to the popular vote more undemocratic than a "winner takes all" system? In the latter system, election minorities, even strong ones, are routinely disenfranchised. Your argument for less democracy as the system that makes sense is laughable. Or it would be, if it wasn't so vile.

If you can point me to a similarly propagandistic screed in favor of Obama published on Salon, I'd gladly concede your point. I don't think it exists.

My contention is that Salon isn't much of a ref at all. Ms. Walsh is nakedly pro-Clinton in her own writings, as she's entitled to be, but that seems to have tainted her editorial choices as well.

In addition to its one-sidedness, I just don't believe this essay rises to the level of quality to which Salon should aspire. It contains too many slurs and unsubstantiated claims.

. . . we'd have some way of knowing to what degree Clinton or Obama is preferred among all those who voted for Edwards, Biden, Dodd, et al back when they were still in the race.

What the article is true. So what? I'll tell you. The DNC hierarchy hve their knickers in a knot because the primary isn't decided. Gee, where can we point the blame.

By definition, the set up was intended to make the primary season longer. How else can you account for the idiocy that is now happening. But now the it seems that people are in a hurry to get this thing over with.

But beyond the proportional primaries it gets even weirder. Let's let Guam and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and "Americans Abroad' have delegates to the convention even though they con't vote for president.

I can go on about how the caucus is only for the party insiders. but who cares. That's the system. I like to look to the delegates and the staes. How many of the states that the candidates have won have voted for a Democrat for president in the last 40 years. Those states are really inportant to an election..... You bet they are.

Let's put aside for the moment some of the details this article gets wrong, usually by oversimplifying or outright mischaracterizing the facts. The larger issue is the circumstances of Wilentz's basic argument. He is not making it outside the confines of an ongoing election, but rather attempting to claim that the current system agreed to by all participants doesn't "make sense," and by implication should be changed. Yet we all understand, and have since grade school, that to change the rules of a competitive race while the race is still going on is patently unfair. Moreover, when such proposed rule changes would clearly benefit Wilentz's preferred nominee, it makes the whole argument come off as disingenuous in the extreme.

Now as to the argument itself, it seems absurd on some level to claim a system that would give the nomination to the popular vote loser makes more sense than one that rewards the candidate with the most votes. If we could even imagine that the current vote totals would remain the same in a winner-take-all environment, Obama has won more of them, even if you count Florida and Michigan (where he got 0 votes, due to his absence from the ballot, while Clinton picked up over 300,000). In fact, the only way Clinton could claim a popular vote lead would be to count Michigan and Florida, then exclude caucuses, disenfranchising residents of Iowa, Nevada, Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Washington, Maine, Wyoming and Hawaii. That's a level of metric-splicing that seems perfect for a political satire, not real-life.

In other words, Wilentz's entire premise rests on the idea that a winner-take-all system makes more sense. His reasoning is interesting, but it proves nothing more than such a system would be less likely to result in the current unresolved contest. My reasoning, and the reasoning of many Democrats and non-Democrats, is that a system that awards the majority of delegates to the candidate with the majority of the popular vote makes the most sense.

What amazes me is that people are actually buying in to the idea that a protracted primary contest will hurt the Democratic Party's chances in November

Look at some extended primary contests:

1976 Republicans (they lost)
1980 Democrats (they lost)
1984 Democrats (they lost)
Pelosi might have cause to be paranoid

Senator Clinton agreed to follow the rules -- the rules that stated that if Michigan and Florida moved their primaries up in the schedule their delegates would not be seated at the convention. She did this back when it was assumed the nomination would be hers and there would be no long drawn out fight. But now that it's become politically beneficial for those rules to be overturned, she has changed her position.

Senator Clinton showed a similar pattern of behavior in being for the war in Iraq when the public was behind it but now that they are not, and it is politically beneficial for her to be opposed to it, she has changed her position.

Senator Clinton doesn't take a position, she positions herself.

to suggest that however Obama is viewing the delegate race would be viewed any differently by Hillary Clinton should she be in his shoes. The lofty rhetoric about populism and democracy is laughable, given that Wilentz would be arguing precisely the same case for Clinton were she winning in the way that Obama is.

Clinton fans, don't bother with your predicted response ("But she's not holding herself up as a different kind of candidate!") You really can't have it both ways--hating Obama (and/or fans) for claiming he's different and then holding Clinton to lower standards b/c she's never claimed to be anything better than politics as usual.

I should also point out that this article assumes a correlation between performance in a Democratic primary and performance in that same state in the general election. It is to say that states with a high likelihood of voting for the Republican nominee somehow have less significance than more traditionally Democratic-leaning states, and that the ability to win a primary in those states is more indicative than winning one in say... Georgia.

What I would like to see if Wilentz make some attempt to prove that argument. What evidence is there that Obama is likely to lose California or New York in the general election, simply because he lost those states to Clinton in a primary? The answer is there isn't any.