But as a poor student and lowly clinton supporter, my budget is already stretched thin.

It's not much! Really, it's not. And think of the extra heft to threats not to renew, versus to not subscribe in the first place!

Much more satisfying. (One hears.)

And, uh, yeah, I think you might find a few more Clinton supporters around Salon.

...given the blatant and obvious bias of the writer toward...what? Mr. Wilentz obviously has no clue as to what is underway in the Democratic Party. His use of particular adjectives to describe the Democratic system of selecting delegates ("convoluted" and "eccentric") without documented reasons on why those terms should even be used is suspect enough. His obvious partiality toward the "winner take all" mentality of the Republican Primary and the Electoral College convicts him of membership in the 28% club who still support the Current Occupant (slogan: "the best presidency that a Supreme Court can buy"). It is why Mr. Obama is advocating a change in the way business is done in this country.

Sean Wilentz doesn't have a clue. Shame on you, Salon, for not vetting the absurdity of his arguments.

The official publicly-announced Democratic National Committee position on the Michigan and Florida primaries, before they were held, was that their results would not be considered because those two states had violated the DNC rules. And I believe no candidate, not even Hillary Clinton, objected to that before the primaries were held. So how would it make sense now to change that understood rule in retrospect and honor the very compromised "results" of those primaries?

Would reverting to a "winner take all" (unit rule, I think) primary format somehow change the fact that Barack Obama has received more actual votes than has Hillary Clinton, even in spite of the widely publicized right-wing "Operation Chaos" campaign urging dedicated Republicans who are guaranteed to vote Republican in November to vote for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries where they can get away with it? (It's difficult to do that in a caucus, BTW.)

And assuming it would not, then how is it that some other system that would effectively overrule the majority (or at least plurality) of voters in favor of a less popular candidate somehow be more fair or democratic? What am I missing, or is this just really a dumb argument?

The Democratic Party decided in advance of the primaries to use a proportional voting system. The Clinton people played a major role in setting these rules. They agreed without reservations to accept this arrangement. Why is winner-take-all more sensible than proportional voting? Proportional voting gives a much more reliable measure of each candidate's true strength.

Clinton's primary wins in the "big states" does not guarantee that she will be the strongest candidate in November. Both Obama and Clinton would win California, New York, Illinois and Massachusetts in November. Both Obama and Clinton would lose Texas in November. If you remove these states from consideration, the electoral college winner-takes all rules favor Obama, not Clinton.

Recent polling also suggests that Clinton is weaker than Obama against McCain.

But just thought I'd throw it on the pile.

I've been reading these threads off and on for a while now but have refrained from posting because my sensitive nature keeps me from wanting to be ridiculed for my support of one of the candidates. The level of personal vitriol is very disturbing. However, I am cautiously optimistic -- probably naively so -- that when the general election rolls around, all of the supposed democrats on this thread will rally around the democratic candidate and return us to the White House. Please prove me right.

Wilenz' article assumes that we are or should be a 'democracy', not a republic, designed from the beginning to ensure that the voices of smaller states, jurisdictions and groups are not lost in sheer numbers. We aren't a democracy.

The Constitutional structure of the Electoral college, weighted toward smaller states, reflects that continuing concern, no matter how much some of us hated it in 2000, before vote cheating. A number of states such as Nevada also reflect that concern, where rural popular voices would vanish against the weight of numbers in Las Vegas and Reno. So does the Voting Rights Act, which bars the drawing of electoral lines to disenfranchise certain groups, by dividing their core areas among a group of districts in each of which they are a minority bound to lose on a winner take all race every time out. Or those who elect for state or regional matters a blend of at large and district seats, to the same effect. All equally honorable and American.

It is ironic that Prof. Wilenz overlooks this consistent concern in his loathing of caucuses which require voters to face down one another and discuss matters face to face rather than going into the anonymity of the voting booth. Presumably, he also hates open primaries, which lets non-Democrats vote in the choosing of the Democratic candidates. In condemning everything, it would seem that nothing the Democratic voters have done in any state this year is genuinely legitimate to him.

The peculiarity of his article is his rejection, in mid-campaign, of all rules, urging instead that the gross popular primary vote does not matter and the delegate count does not matter, and caucus states shouldn't exist, but that the only charge is to determine who is more likely to win in November, with no clear notion of who makes that decision or how it is now to be made. The old guys in the back room used to be very good at that, old Boss Tweed, but that is a model all parties have rejected.

And the push this year in most places is that states not normally taken into account have and want to have their distinct voices heard. The irony, of course, is that one candidate used a big state stragegy and had no organization in the smaller states and caucus states, as a result of which that candidate has won ten of forty states contested to date and will have no organization in place for November in the smaller states which count disproportionately in the Electoral College. So I do not understand where his Electoral College method argument goes.

The only important thing to me in any state is that the party use a system its voters are comfortable with, whether or not I ever figure out how Texas works, to have their share of the voice in choosing the candidate all those voters think will win, and that the agreed rules for running that system are applied neutrally. Not a system whose validation by the writer is determined by his agreement with the outcome.