If pigs could fly...

I don't think he realizes what's happened. It's like he's still standing there, blinking in surprise, while the world has moved on and away from him.

The Obama campaign would been structured around it, and still kicked her ass. Hillary clinton's failure can be laid at one place and one place only: Hillary Clinton's feet. Poorly managed, poorly executed, her campaign was a disaster. She did nothing to dispel negative notions surrounding her personally (in fact, she enhanced them!). Her entitled attitude. Resorting to negative tactics that crossed the line into the personal and undercut her own party. Dodgy, ambiguous policy positions. Dishonesty.

Barack Obama ran a campaign that succeeded in a system tailor-made to hoist a front-runner to the nomination. This is Hillary Clinton's failure, not the system's.

Nice article. Too bad all the editor's picks comments related to the article are Pro-Obama articles.

Wow, God forbid that we lean closer to proportional representation than Electoral College style candidate selection! Had we done that in 2000, Gore would have been president instead of Bush, and who would have wanted that!?

Once again, the democrats are trying to shoot themselves in the foot. A two term senator who 49% (latest polling) of the electorate think his greatest weakness is experience, seems to be a reasonable nominee to put up against McCain. Two wars, a struggling economy, a healthcare crisis he knows nothing about, and Obama is going to win in November? Talk about fantasy land.

Quick note about Editor's Picks - you should call them Obamabot Picks. I'm surprised this article even got posted.

The Winner-take-all and Electoral College systems reduce the precision with which an election's outcome reflects the will of the people. This system is roughly comparable to a highly pixilated photo, when what is desired is a clear, high-resolution image.

The proportional, delegate-based system is a slight improvement, a slightly better image, if you will.

A national contest open to registered Democrats and determined by the popular vote is what's desirable. That is the only system that is sane and fair. In such a system, Obama would be winning.

I guess it's no surprise to see Wilentz, a Clinton apologist, advocating for the least democratic system possible. You tell em, Sean--"Clinton would be winning if democracy mattered as little as it should." The establishment sure doesn't like getting shaken up much, does it?

What an utterly naked, dishonest hit-job on Obama. I'm glad that a random sampling of the 200+ comments that precede mine shows that the Salon community knows trash when they see it.

This is at least the second time that I've read a Sean Wilentz op-ed that presented itself as an unbiased view of the Democratic primary campaign, despite the obvious fact that this isn't true. He has a very transparent agenda, and he obviously continues to support his previous employers. He basically just repeats Clinton campaign talking points in his op-eds, pushing tripe about "winning big states" and caucuses that are dominated by "students and activists" (while totally ignoring the fact that the demographic with the most free time -- senior citizens -- overwhelmingly supports his candidate). It would be nice if there was a disclaimer on each of his op-eds that mentioned that he is a Clinton supporter.

Also, he made a very basic mathematical error when he was trying to make a point about winner-take-all systems. 2024 isn't some magic number that is enshrined in the DNC rulebook, it's a bare majority of delegates. If you add Florida and Michigan delegates to the pool, then a majority becomes 2024 + (Florida delegates + Michigan delegates)/2.

The object of any campaign is to succeed under the rules in effect at the time the contest is being decided. It makes no sense to be critical of Obama for running a better campaign than Clinton.

Furthermore, the rules were stacked in favor of big-name big-money candidates like Clinton. The thing that defeated her was not the rules; she was defeated by an attractive candidate who had the financial support of more than one million small donors.

Surely that is a better version of Democracy than "direct election" dominated by political insiders?

I'm not sure what's so sacrosanct about the Electoral College. You'll have a hard time arguing that a winner-take-all primary is fair, or more fair than the present system. And it's a pretty weak argument to say that performance in the party primary is a reflection of relative strengths when it comes to a presidential Electoral College. The people who vote in the Ohio primaries are mainly Democrats. In a general election, Obama may very well fare better in the moderate state of Ohio than Clinton would (in fact, several polls have suggested that Obama polls better among Independents and even conservatives).

It just seems to me that you've taken the line that since Clinton isn't going to win the nomination, we need to see the primary in a different light.

I'm not buying.

Apologies if this has been said before.

Eight years ago, a winner-take-all system (and some nasty dealings in Florida) gave George W. Bush a Presidential victory over Al Gore. despite losing the popular vote nationwide. Now Sean Wilentz is arguing that a similar system is the 'right' system and the one that should be used to determine the Democratic nominee?

Is he insane?

all the big endorsements.

Her team wrote the rules and set the schedule for the 2008 primary. She entered January with a 20-point lead based on all of those advantages which, apparently, are not unfair at all, but advantages she was entitled to. For some reason that has never been explained.

And yet, the voters are rejecting her.

Now, having lost her lead and losing at the game whose rules her team wrote, she and her acolytes whinge about how unfair it all is. This, my little Hillbot friends, is why you are held in such contempt.

Sean Wilentz is an historian for whom I have great respect--who couldn't love a guy who wrote a long article on why Bush is the nation's worst president ever?--but his article on the current Democratic race contained some very misleading statements. He implies that Obama's campaign is somehow thwarting democracy because it opposes seating delegates from Michigan and Florida. Michigan and Florida broke the rules, and their delegates should not be seated. They may have been bad rules, but they were the rules in place. Why in the world should Obama participate in rewarding those state parties for rules violations, especially when it would hurt him? Worse, to support his attack, Wilentz repeats Clinton's old fraud about Obama campaigning in Florida. Obama did not campaign in Florida. He bought some ads on CNN and MSNBC which were to run nationwide. He asked that they not run in Florida, but CNN and MSNBC said they couldn't pull them from just Florida stations. Had Obama campaigned in those states, both of which have large Black populations, he might have won one or both.

As to Wilentz' main point, that under a winner take all system, Clinton would be ahead, such a counter-factual assumes that Obama would have followed the same strategy under that scenario as he has under the current rules. Maybe Clinton would be ahead, maybe not. And maybe a winner take all system is best. But Obama is winning under the rules as they are.