This is an appallingly bad piece for all of the reasons already cited in this comment thread. It makes Salon look dumb, demeans the level of conversation, and ensures that I will never again read anything written by the moronic Sean Wilentz. Whichever candidate you support, there is no way that this article is even vaguely rational.

I also have a problem with the nomination system. Its troubling to me that a person can win a caucus like Nevada or a primary state like Texas and have less delegates than the person who finishes second. I also believe caucuses are undemocratic and easily manipulated and feel the party should invest in alternative voting systems like vote by mail or the internet that would allow for greater voter participation. That said, this is the system every other Democratic nominee including Bill Clinton was elected under. No one complained about it in the past. If Mr. Obama is the nominee he will have won the nomination fair and square. It may be true Hillary would have a wide lead in delegates if she were in the GOP, but she is not in the GOP, she chose to be in the Democratic party and she knew the rules just like everybody else when the campaign began. Obama has run a better campaign and if he wins Hillary just got beat. Some things in life are not meant to be. PS. Florida and Michigan must be seated. The party should not punish loyal Democrats for the errors of their leaders. The voter participation of thousands of Democrats cannot be sacrificed on the altar of allowing two small homogenous states to keep its privileged place in the election rotation. Those voters came out to vote even when told it wouldn't matter. They are the party!

All HRC and her campaign had to do was show some respect to the process and go to the trouble of learning how it works.

The way the process works is the superdelegates may vote for either candidate, regardless of whether one or the other holds a slight advantage in pledged delegates or the popular vote. They are encouraged to weigh those factors in their decision, along with the fact that Barack Obama cannot win in November.

The rules say that when neither candidate reaches the pledged delegate threshold (those numbers are arrived at through undemocratic means in many of Obama's states which held caucuses), the supers step in.

...because our system for selecting candidates is totally unrepresentative. The entire "caucus" system is a joke: the rules are vague, the process is disorganized, and the delegates are allocated based on political gamesmanship, not rewarding candidates for getting more votes. Tiny states with no real influence in the general election have an inordinate amount of power because ... well, because they always have. Large states that will have a significant influence on the general election are usually left out of the process altogether. It's almost as if Republicans designed our primary system to make it as unlikely as possible that we would select a Democratic candidate who could actually win an election.

....Wilentz never addresses the sticky problem that Obama leads in the popular vote. To advocate an alternate universe where more people vote for one candidate yet the other, less popular candidate wins the nomination is a lttle weird. I'll be so happy when this is over.

Obvious point number one: If Sean Wilentz's "sensible" winner-take-all system had been in place for the Democratic primaries, both campaigns (correction: all ten Democratic campaigns for the nomination) would have been run differently. You cannot take the results of the campaigns we had and apply them to rules we did not have. Obama's campaign outmaneuvered and outperformed Clinton's campaign in the primaries we had, and there is every reason to believe he would have done the same in the alternate universe of Wilentz's "sensible" system. (In which case, he would be complaining that Clinton would be ahead if we had had some other "sensible" system.)

Obvious point number two: As a Michigan voter, I am sick and tired of hearing people blame the Obama campaign for "disenfranchising" Michigan voters. It was our idiotic state Democratic "leadership" who disenfranchised us by deliberately contravening clear national party rules. It is only now, months later, that they are belatedly beginning to realize that they aren't going to get away with it after all, and they are frantically blaming everybody else for the fiasco when they should be looking in the mirror. (That, and resigning, if they had any sense of honor.) What we had in Michigan was not a primary, it was a farce and a fraud.

... but this biased tripe ain't it. I call "bullshit."

Following the rules is not a ploy, and given our country's current predicament, it is "something new [and] transformative." I'm all for hypotheticals that help the world, but you arguing that Clinton would be in the lead if just Barack and Co. would not obey the rules and cede their delegates to her is a patent granted for stupidity (no offense).

As a writer, I'll give you 2 more chances. But please spare us by not turning in anymore articles like this one.

How about a system where the candidate who lies with regularity would lose, or a system where the camdodate with the most number of aids getting fired would lose? Then your candidate--the oh so dishonest lady--would lose. How about a system where, whatever the rules are in advance, jerks like you stop whining. Too much to ask, especially from the elite.

This article is kind of a rant, and I don't really care about whether Clinton would be ahead in a winner-take-all system.

But the article also claims that Clinton would be ahead in the popular vote. Is this true? If so, she should get the nomination, simple as that. The whole system is rubbish anyway: inherently undemocratic and favoring early states like Iowa and New Hampshire for no good reason. The candidates should be decided by a vote, and it should be one vote per person.

Dan Sheehy