Generation Gap

Defining and pigeonholing generations can be fun as long as you don't take it too seriously. Pop psychologists regularly publish books and articles explaining how the diverse experiences of millions of Americans can be neatly summarized by the era in which they grew up. Thus, you have the Greatest (or G.I.) Generation, the Silent Generation, the Baby Boomers, Generation Jones, Generation X, and the Millennials.

Ever since John F. Kennedy, at 43 years old, captured the White House in 1960, the presidency has been dominated first by the G.I.s (JFK through Bush the First) and more recently by the Boomers (Clinton and Bush the Second). If anything, this reality should give pause to anyone who seeks to explain presidential behavior and success in terms of generational values. George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter exhibited none of the boldness of Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan. George W. Bush's callow recklessness had little in common with Bill Clinton's timid triangulation.

Still, the human brain is programmed to look for patterns, and it's difficult to convince people to stop thinking in terms of generational identity even after you point out that Bob Dylan and Wayne Newton were born less than a year apart. So let's go ahead and play along. How will their generational affiliation influence the behavior of the current crop of presidential candidates?

If you're into this sort of discussion, the first thing you notice is that two previously unrepresented generations are likely to face off for the grand prize in November. John McCain represents the Silent Generation's last chance to make it into the history books. The Silents, born between 1930 and 1944 (or thereabouts) have not only failed to produce a chief executive, they have coughed up just two major party nominees, the less-than-memorable Fritz Mondale and Michael Dukakis during the 1980s. If McCain is denied, the youngest of their tribe will be 68 in 2012 and the oldest 82.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, is the first credible candidate to be offered by Generation Jones (I hate the name, but it seems to have caught on), the post-Boomers born between 1956 and 1965. Superficially, at least, Obama possesses all the core characteristics of a Joneser, having avoided military service, snorted cocaine, and written a painfully introspective book about getting in touch with his feelings. Somewhere hidden deep within an old box of keepsakes is probably a little yellow smiley-face button.

We are rarely treated to a presidential contest between "father" and "son" generations, so the 2008 election (assuming Boomer Hillary doesn't crash the party) should at least be entertaining. The last time this happened was 1992, with Poppy Bush barely disguising his contempt for that draft-dodging, pot-smoking, moral degenerate, Bill Clinton. We now understand that Bush was probably just working out his feelings about his eldest son, but at the time it felt like Ali-Frazier III, the rubber match between heavyweight generations. The G.I.s won the battle of 1968, the Boomers knocked out Dick Nixon in 1974, and it was time for these two aging pugs to have one last go at it. (What we didn’t realize at the time was that the real battle in 1992 was between the left- and right-wing factions of the Boomer generation itself, a contest that continues to this day.)

What, then, should we expect from this latest intergenerational contest? Well, here are two descriptions, one of each generation:

"[They] appear to offer a more conservative and less secular approach to politics…"

"[T]hey became empathizers, mediators, and conciliators…[and] they preferred more intellectual approaches to problems, and tried to avoid nasty confrontations."

How about it? Which one better describes Barack Obama and which captures the essence of John McCain? I'm setting you up, of course; the first passage refers to Gen Jones and the second to the Silents born during the '30s. Neither candidate, it seems, is an exemplar of his generation the same way that Bush Senior and Clinton were of theirs. Indeed, strong evidence suggests that Obama's cohort, having come of age during Ronald Reagan's presidency and inexplicably fallen under the B-movie actor's spell, is the most Republican of any age group. Without their ballots, John Kerry would currently be running for re-election. The Silent Generation, on the other hand, is far more likely to support Democratic candidates at all levels.

What does all this mean? Hell if I know. But it does suggest that any pop psych "theory" that wants to lump John McCain together with Michael Dukakis probably shouldn't be given too much credence.

Taking the Week Off

Now that it's Sunday, I can tell you that I decided to take last week off. I didn't miss work, or stop bathing, or anything stupid like that. Instead, I (mostly) swore off the 2008 presidential campaign. I blogged about it, of course, but I generally avoided watching the cable news networks or checking out the more political websites. Old habits die hard, so I didn't exactly go cold turkey, but I came closer than I have in at least a couple of years.

In short, I spent the past week living the life of a typical American.

This wasn't something I planned. I don't want to sound like one of those annoying, self-important yuppies who annually observe "Turn Off Your TV Week" and then brag about it to anyone who will listen. I just got fed up. I detest manufactured political news and that's about all there is out there right now. Desperate for something to talk about, the various anchors and their predictable lineup of talking heads are left to speculate on the earth-shattering importance of some trivial gaffe made by one or another candidate's deputy vice-director for photo ops. Even Keith Olbermann has become increasingly unwatchable as he slowly embraces the troubling anti-Hillary bias of his MSNBC stablemates.

So I just quit. And I'm glad I did. From the outside, the presidential campaign seems so much less urgent. Who cares about Clinton and Obama when March Madness is in full swing and the baseball season awaits? Why follow John McCain's cross-country biography tour (Good call, John! Remind everyone how old you are.) when your cable system has over 200 channels of counter-programming, at least five of which are running one of the Godfather movies? My iPod contains well over 5,000 of my favorite songs, even the worst of which (probably "Chevy Van") brings me more pleasure than any one of Chris Matthews' unhinged diatribes.

And it's not like you can completely tune out the candidates regardless of how hard you try. You flip on the local news during a severe weather watch and there they are. Their names come up constantly in the late night comedy monologues. Even blogs that are decidedly apolitical occasionally make passing reference to some controversy that occurred on the campaign trail. I am vaguely aware, for example, that some hospital in Ohio is denying one of Senator Clinton's stories about how they refused to treat an ailing woman who subsequently died. I'm sure the fanatics over at Daily Kos are having a field day with this. (Just checked. They are.)

I'll probably spend the next few days slowly working back into my regular routine of TV watching and web surfing. I don't want to fall too far behind. But it was nice to be reminded that politics is only a small corner of the world, and that millions of Americans insist on treating it that way. Many of them will start paying attention once the nominees are chosen and the race begins in earnest. But they will not dwell on each meaningless detail of the campaign just because Brit Hume or Lou Dobbs or Tucker Carlson tells them to. (I know Tucker no longer has his own show. Evidently, the public appetite for smugness is finite.)

In the meantime, GO [INSERT NAME OF FAVORITE BASEBALL TEAM HERE]!

Exposing the Myth of the "PC University"

The beauty of the right-wing lie is that once it works its way into the national bloodstream there is virtually nothing that can be done to banish it. Even today, in the face of a mountain of contradictory evidence, millions of our fellow citizens believe not only that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden collaborated on the 9/11 attacks, but that at least some of the al Qaeda hijackers held Iraqi passports. Gullible Americans express fears that Barack Obama secretly pledges loyalty to radical Islam and intends to destroy the United States from within. About one in every fifty cars you pass on the interstate carries someone who is convinced that Bill Clinton is a rapist or that his wife is a murderer. Ours is a nation of conspiracy theorists and the far right has exploited that fact with enormous success.

In my business, higher education, the most persistent lie involves the prevalence of ideological—that is, liberal—brainwashing on college campuses. From the basic, but largely irrelevant, truth that a majority of college professors support Democratic candidates for public office, conservative rabble rousers have spun tall tales of rampant political indoctrination by academic radicals who use their classrooms as pulpits and ridicule or even fail students who stand up for God, motherhood, and country. Entire blogs and organizations are dedicated to this proposition or, more importantly, to feeding this idea to the ignorant and ill-informed.

The dozen or so of you who frequent this blog are aware that this is an issue I address periodically. The reason I do so is because the myth of liberal indoctrination has burrowed its way into thousands of narrow minds and has become something of a nuisance on its way to being a threat. Fifteen years ago, few parents or students ever asked me about my political leanings or those of my colleagues. Now it happens all the time. Junior McCarthyites monitor lectures in the social sciences and humanities, reporting any hint of political bias—usually imagined—to websites designed to shame and embarrass. Ignorant and pandering legislators introduce, and occasionally pass, bills designed to foster "ideological diversity" in academia, a form of affirmative action for conservatives.

As I have pointed out on several occasions, most of us who make our careers in this business find the whole discussion bizarre and perplexing. I have not once, in twenty years in higher education, heard anyone discuss a job applicant's political views. Generally, they aren't known or knowable, but even when they are, nobody cares. The truly important divisions in most departments involve theory and methodology, neither of which has an inherently ideological basis. In my own field, I have seen liberal and conservative professors unite against what they see as the unwarranted dominance of quantitative research in the discipline.

I have also, at various times in my career, held administrative posts that compelled me to hear student grievances. Most of these, of course, involved the allegedly unfair application of professors' grading standards. Some, however, concerned allegations of bias in the classroom, with a small number of students claiming that their grades suffered because they didn't tell the professor what he or she wanted to hear.

I am sure this sort of thing does happen. Nevertheless, in my experience, over 90% (actually, just about 100%) of these accusations fall apart when hard evidence is requested. Yes, a few professors get off a snide anti-Bush joke every now and again, and delicate sensibilities can be easily offended. But I have yet to see proof of a single instance where an instructor pushed a political viewpoint so hard that basic course material went unaddressed. Nor have any of my students ever substantiated an allegation of grading skewed by ideology.

Again, I realize that there are a few bad actors out there. Some professors sleep with their students. Some commit acts of sexual harassment. Others no doubt reduce students' grades because they support the Iraq War. The right-wing noise machine revels in locating these rare cases and arguing that the plural of anecdote is data.

Still, the vast majority of academics that I know have too much respect for their students (and too much modesty about their own feeble powers of persuasion) to try to indoctrinate anyone. They dutifully present all sides of every argument. They glow with pride when a frustrated student finally asks, "So which is it? Are you a Democrat or a Republican?"

The good news is that we are finally developing hard empirical evidence that refutes the conservative case against academia. In the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education comes word of a study demonstrating that the people who know us best—our current and recent students—are the least likely to believe the right-wing myth about political indoctrination. Says the Chronicle:

"That's the chief finding of a question from a survey conducted through The Chronicle/Gallup Panel that asked Americans: "How often do you believe that college professors use their classrooms as a platform for their personal politics?

"Only 29 percent of those age 25 to 34, and who are more likely to have spent time on a college campus in recent years, responded that professors "often" use their classrooms to espouse their political views. But that response grew to 41 percent of those between the ages of 45 and 54, and to nearly 60 percent of those over age 65."

Conservative academic critics, of course, willfully ignore the study's most important conclusion and immediately jump to that figure of 29%. "It's only by contrast," says right-wing blogger Erin O'Connor, "that 29 percent can be seen as 'only' 29 percent. There are more than 14 million college students in this country at any given time. 29 percent of that figure is a whopping number…"

Why yes, yes it is. Except that anyone who understands the situation knows that a hefty share, probably the vast majority, of that 29% is made up of ideologically charged students (left and right, but mostly right) who consider even a balanced presentation to be hopelessly one-sided. If a professor dares to mention that the Japanese had some legitimate grievances leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, she is biased. If an instructor even broaches the subject of institutional racism, then he is an anti-American radical.

Indeed, the most telling number in the entire survey is this one: "About 70 percent of Republicans but only 17 percent of Democrats said professors often use their classrooms as political platforms…" Right-wing students are told to expect faculty bias, and so they naturally find it, even where it doesn't necessarily exist.

Unable to refute the raw power of the numbers, professional academic critics simply move the goalposts. "The problem of the PC university," says Anne Neal, who can't even string six words together without trafficking in hoary clichés, "is not so much unrelenting political rants, although they exist, so much as it is that certain topics are not taught, certain disciplinary perspectives are not covered, and certain questions can't be asked." Adds O'Connor, the real issue is not "the political demagogue stumping for lefty causes in class", but rather the "soft bias that is rampant on campus."

In anyone else's world, of course, these statements would be accurately seen as concessions that the conservative critique of the academy is, in fact, terribly overstated. Evidently, hard-core indoctrination efforts are few and far between (take that, David Horowitz!). Neal and O'Connor, however, would have us believe that the relative absence of classroom demagoguery itself simply masks a more insidious and pernicious form of mind control.

Regardless, the fact that millions of American are being hoodwinked into believing the myth of the "PC university" remains troubling. People who have never set foot on a university campus (or who haven't done so since Eisenhower was president) are full participants in our democracy. We must, therefore, somehow find a way to get the truth out to them, the truth that the overwhelming majority of our students already know.

It Was Forty Years Ago Today

I was sitting in my elementary school classroom when the campus intercom brought word that John F. Kennedy had been cut down in Dallas. I was just waking up and coming to breakfast five years later when the Today Show informed me that Bobby had also been murdered. I was in a cab on the way to the airport when the driver mentioned that the space shuttle Challenger had just exploded. And on 9/11, I was headed to work and happened to flip on the radio, only to hear Peter Jennings' voice on what should have been a music station.

But I have no lasting memory of where I was or what I was doing when I first learned about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I understood that Dr. King's death was a major news story and I knew him to be a good man fighting on the right side of history. From my thoroughly Yankee vantage point, however, the civil rights movement was something that was happening "down there" in the South, a hopelessly backward region made up of inexplicably vicious white people and heroic, long-suffering descendants of former slaves. There was no question whose side I was on, but, as a child, I always regarded it as someone else's fight.

The fortieth anniversary of Dr. King's death is being observed with any number of stories speculating as to what might have happened had James Earl Ray misfired on that terrible spring day. What would Dr. King have done in the forty years between 1968 and 2008? How would he be regarded by succeeding generations, both black and white? What role would he have played in American life as the Movement matured, and issues of fundamental equality gave way to thornier matters involving school busing and affirmative action?

It is impossible to answer these questions, of course, with any confidence. Dr. King remains forever 39 years old in our minds, but in reality, he would have changed with the times as the rest of us did. Indeed, his lieutenants traveled in a variety of directions during subsequent years. Andrew Young and John Lewis went into politics, the former an increasingly moderate Democrat and the latter an unapologetic liberal. Jesse Jackson founded operation PUSH in Chicago, twice ran for president, and ultimately emerged as the most visible—and controversial—of the Movement's alumni. Dr. King's immediate successor, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, carried forward his mentor's cause, though with far less success, before ultimately throwing his support behind the 1980 presidential candidacy of Ronald Reagan, a man who made his first significant campaign appearance, either pointedly or obliviously, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered less than twenty years earlier.

The country was changing in 1968. Dr. King recognized those changes before most other Americans did, and he was already acting in response to them at the time of his death. He understood not only that the dismantling of the Jim Crow regime represented merely the opening round in the fight for equality, but he also knew that the next steps would engender increasing white resistance, and not just in the south. Against the advice of many of his advisers, for example, Dr. King became a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War, a conflict that he accurately saw as being fought primarily by the children or poor and working class Americans.

The white backlash was already in full swing in April, 1968, though most observers had yet to notice. George Wallace of Alabama had just started to take his toxic politics north of the Mason-Dixon Line, revealing broad support beyond the boundaries of the Old Confederacy. Before the decade was out, Daniel Patrick Moynihan would pen his infamous "benign neglect" memo to Richard Nixon, urging the new president to put issues of racial justice on the back burner. Dr. King himself was the target of increasingly angry newspaper editorials, as white journalists decried his unwillingness to keep in his place and stay out of controversial issues of foreign and economic policy.

It is quite possible, therefore, that white America, convinced that various laws and court rulings had finally settled the issue of equality, would have started to tune out Dr. King as the 1960s came to an end. I suspect that my family represented much of the northern, Caucasian population, sympathetic to the civil rights cause, but seeing it far too dispassionately as something happening elsewhere. How long might it have been before the first white pundit, weary of the Movement and frightened of the implications of its nationalization, carelessly accused Dr. King of playing the "race card"?

I do not wish be misunderstood. Dr. King could never have become irrelevant. He was too bright, too charismatic, too powerful to be ignored. Certainly, Young and Lewis and, especially, Jackson have remained in the public eye for the past four decades. But like his protégés, Dr. King's image would have become more complex as his movement became more complex. And the vicious, often racist background noise about infidelity and plagiarism would have attached itself to a living man rather than an honored martyr, and Dr. King would have found himself forced to wade through the shallow celebrity culture that emerged in the 1970s and has dominated the media ever since.

I wish Dr. King were still with us, but not because I imagine that he would have ushered in some magical era of racial healing. Instead, the Reverend's death deprived the country of a man of enduring stature and transcendent credibility just at the moment that the civil rights movement was about to face the backlash, Nixon's "Southern Strategy", and the divisive politics of the 1970s and 1980s. I'd like to think that, when Ronald Reagan began to spin his crypto-racist tales of Welfare Queens, Martin Luther King would have been there to match the Gipper jab for jab, bringing his own charisma to the fight. And when the Republicans assailed affirmative action by appropriating Dr. King's ringing words about being judged by the content of our character, the great man himself would have put them in their place.

But he's gone, and all the speculation in the world will never tell us how much we truly lost on that early April day in Memphis forty years ago. Still, many of Dr. King's greatest gifts remain with us today. Perhaps the greatest of all is the recognition, four decades later, that the civil rights movement was and is a truly American struggle, and not simply something involving someone else somewhere else.

End the Tyranny of Caucuses!

Let's look ahead to November's general election and assume, as is now likely, that Barack Obama wins the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. But let's also make one further assumption: Obama loses to John McCain and the Democrats blow their best chance to recapture the White House in twelve years. Be honest: it could happen. The polls are pretty much dead even right now, and the Republicans have an undeniable Electoral College advantage.

I'm not predicting an Obama defeat, you understand. Obviously, unfavorable economic news on top of foreign policy failure typically bodes poorly for the incumbent party and its nominee. And John McCain is perceived by many as an old guy who knows less about economics than the average eBay bidder. Plus, Obama is eloquent, inspiring, he's the choice of a new generation (or was that Pepsi?), etc., etc., etc.

Still, the scenario by which Obama loses remains fairly easy to envision, even without a new and devastating terrorist attack. While the inflammatory words of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, may not have affected his support among Democrats, they continue to burn in the ears of independents and marginal Republicans. In addition, the bar will be set so high for Obama at this fall's presidential debates that McCain will merely have to speak in a language vaguely resembling English to acquit himself successfully. And we still have no idea what Rovian viciousness the GOP has up its sleeve in anticipation of an Obama candidacy.

And what state is Obama going to bring into the Democratic fold that John Kerry didn't capture in his losing effort four years ago? Hillary Clinton decisively won the two big swing states, Florida and Ohio, and Floridians in particular may well blame Obama for depriving them of their right to participate in the nomination process. Winning Missouri or Colorado would be insufficient; it's not even clear that winning both of them would get Obama over the hump. When the ballots are counted in seven months, most of Obama's best primary and caucus states, those in the Great Plains, Rockies, and Deep South, will support the Republican Party just as they have in nearly every election since Lyndon Johnson beat down Barry Goldwater nearly half a century ago.

So sure, Obama could definitely win, but he could also lose. For the sake of argument, let's assume the latter. The Wednesday after the election, as the Democrats spend another cold November evening in the grip of despair, one question will pass nearly every lip: Would we have done better with Hillary? That, of course, would be impossible to know with any accuracy, but the possibility would nevertheless haunt the party faithful.

The answer would obviously depend on exactly how Obama lost. If he was held to just the Kerry states, with perhaps a pickup of Iowa and New Mexico, speculation will center once more on Ohio and Florida, and Obama's fairly one-sided primary losses in both places. If he fell just one small state short, as Al Gore did in 2000, pundits might wonder if a likely Hillary win in Arkansas would have made the difference. The point is that should Barack Obama lose in November, nothing that happened this spring will matter. Instead, the party will be dominated by what-if games.

Should this occur, perhaps one good thing could come out of it. The Democrats might finally, at long last, put an end to the tyranny of the caucus. We have known for years that caucuses are easily dominated by ideological fanatics. Most average voters have better things to do than to show up at some schoolhouse or firehouse and give up part of their evening to interact with strangers. To do so takes a special measure of either political interest or single-minded devotion to a candidate. There were, to my knowledge, few if any Democratic caucuses back in 1972, but if there had been several, George McGovern, with his ferocious support among anti-war activists, would have enjoyed overwhelming success in them. Caucus victories simply do not provide representative results.

I've made this point before, but it bears repeating. In the official Washington State caucus, held on February 9, Obama beat Clinton 68% to 31%, an absolute blowout. Ten days later, however, the state party held a non-binding "beauty contest" primary, in which voters' ballots would be merely symbolic. Despite the fact that most everyone knew that this was not the vote that counted, and despite the fact that the period between the caucus and the primary was filled almost non-stop with good news for Obama, the Illinois senator's edge over his New York colleague shrunk from 37% to just 5%. Oh yeah, and 638,000 more Washingtonians participated in the "meaningless" primary than bothered to show up for the binding caucus. There's an obvious lesson here, if the Democrats are willing to learn it.

Without the caucuses, the Democratic presidential campaign would be a virtual dead heat right now. Nobody would be haranguing Hillary about dropping out of the race because everyone would see that her support is, for all practical purposes, equal to Obama's. It is the caucuses, populated largely by ideologues, that have propelled Obama to the presumably insurmountable delegate lead he currently holds.

And perhaps the ideologues are right this time. Maybe Obama is the party's strongest candidate. But in a better system, we would still have a fair fight, and the nomination would still hang in the balance. We would not face the prospect of a frontrunner who is only now being vetted, one who has shown a general inability to win over electorates in most of the states the Democrats need to win in November.

If the Democratic Party somehow manages to lose this presidential election to an out of touch warmonger with a tenth grade economics education, it will not be a result of the fairly mild attacks that have marked the current race for the nomination. Nor will it be because of McCain's wisdom in backing the Iraq Surge, which has cut U.S. troop deaths to "only" one per day with no political settlement in sight. It will have nothing to do with Bill Clinton or James Carville or any of the other mouthy relics of the 1990s.

Instead, the fault will lie with the unfortunate prevalence of unrepresentative party caucuses. So get rid of the Super Delegates if you wish; they were never a particularly useful innovation to begin with. But if you are, like our friends at Daily Kos, going to go on about "people powered politics" or some other such alliterative nonsense, at least have the honesty to acknowledge that caucuses are every bit as elitist as smoke filled rooms. They are simply less concentrated on winning and more concerned with ideological purity.

Twilight of the Super Delegates

Whatever happens between now and November, the 2008 election will almost certainly end the era of the Super Delegate. Back in the 1970s, the average voter did not consider it her birthright to choose each party's presidential nominee. In 1972, the Democrats allowed their selection process to be dominated by primary elections for the first time. Their reward was a 49-state defeat, with George McGovern losing to Richard Nixon in a landslide of historic proportions. When the party, appropriately chastened, decided to return at least some of the power to bosses and insiders, almost nobody complained.

The Democrats added the Super Delegates, political officeholders and party officials, as a check against the sort of ideological, populist uprising that gave McGovern the nomination. At the time, the press, pundits, and even most of the attentive public considered this a reasonable decision. Parties are in the business of winning elections, and if that means rolling back popular sovereignty a little, then so be it. Nobody back in 1973 would have expected the Democratic Party to drive into a ditch for the sake of honoring the results of a bunch of primary elections.

Times, of course, have changed. Over the years, not only has the system of choosing nominees through primaries and caucuses become institutionalized, it has also remained, for the most part, uncontroversial. One candidate would wrap up the nomination well before the convention and the Super Delegates would be irrelevant, serving only to rubber stamp the overwhelming choice of the Democratic electorate.

Things are obviously different this year. In all likelihood, neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton will arrive at the party's Denver convention with enough elected delegates to secure victory. Suddenly, the Super Delegates have been rediscovered, and many voters—especially Obama supporters—are unhappy to learn that they can vote however they wish, even if that means giving the nomination to the second place candidate, in this case Senator Clinton.

This has been, to say the least, a public relations disaster for the Democrats. Obama and his fanatical internet supporters insist that any result in which the Super Delegates side with Hillary will mean that the nomination has been stolen. That this is a willfully ignorant interpretation of party procedures is beside the point. Despite the fact that these rules have been in place for over 35 years, the Obama camp acts as though the goalposts are being moved in the middle of the game. The pundits, many of whom have despised the Clintons since the 1990s, are all too happy to play along.

Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, who either frightens easily or secretly longs for an Obama victory (probably both), now argues that every Super Delegate should be prepared to publicize his or her choice by July 1. Barring the unexpected, this would put enormous pressure on the Supers to ratify the "people's choice", presumably Obama, even though he will have failed to secure the necessary delegates for the nomination. Dean suggests that the prospect of a brokered convention would be fatally damaging to the Democrats' prospects against John McCain and must, therefore, be avoided at all costs.

The Super Delegates, of course, were meant to introduce careful deliberation into the nomination process. Dean wants none of that. God forbid anyone refuse to turn Obama's plurality into a majority.

If Senator Obama wins the presidential election in November, his supporters, both in the grassroots and in the DNC, will have their decisions validated. The Super Delegates, they will say, are not only superfluous, but they almost prevented the right candidate from receiving the nomination and beating the Republicans. The internet devotees of "people powered politics" will, in their moment of triumph, insist on a return to the McGovern era rules in which virtually all delegates are selected through primaries and caucuses. Fair enough: to the victors go the spoils and all that.

Should Obama lose, however, these same people will attempt to blame Hillary Clinton and the Super Delegates for their own lack of wisdom and foresight. They will suggest that Clinton doomed Obama's bid by refusing to give up her campaign even after her efforts began to divide the party and deprive Obama of the head start he needed in the general election race. Without the Super Delegates, they will insist, Senator Clinton would have been forced, by mathematical imperative, to end her bid around the end of February, knowing that she could never win enough popular support to secure the nomination. Had she done so, Senator Obama could have spent the spring uniting the party and marshalling his resources for the fight against the GOP, rather than battling to prevent Hillary's Super Delegate coup.

The problem with both arguments, but especially the latter, is that history, unlike science fiction, allows us no glimpse into the counterfactual. Assuming Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination, we will never know what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had succeeded in her strategy of rallying the Super Delegates behind her. Perhaps such an effort would have led to a triumphant Clinton/Obama ticket.

In a sense, the Democrats who created the role of the Super Delegate back in the 1970s should have seen this coming. Regardless of the supposed independence of these party officials, their actual purpose, to thwart the will of the people, always carried the risk of backlash. Imagine, for example, how George McGovern's supporters, in the angry heat of the Vietnam era, would have reacted if Lyndon Johnson's old vice president, Hubert Humphrey, had found a way to "steal" the nomination from their anti-war champion. A repeat of 1968 Chicago might have erupted right there on the glittering streets of Miami Beach. There are, in fact, worse things than losing 49 states (especially since Nixon had no coattails in '72 and would almost certainly have beaten Humphrey anyway).

Additionally, we should not necessarily assume that the wisdom of the smoke filled room is flawless. The last time Democratic Party regulars beat back an insurgent candidacy came in 1984, when Walter Mondale took the nomination from a young, charismatic Colorado senator named Gary Hart. That was also the second time that the Republicans achieved a 49-state Electoral College victory.

Still, there is an irony in the current dispute over the role of Super Delegates. Although the Democrats have lost five of the eight presidential elections held since 1972, this is the first time the Supers have ever been controversial. And yet, the Obama campaign, a grassroots groundswell largely fueled by ideologically-charged amateurs, represents precisely the kind of McGovern-like candidacy the Super Delegates were intended to scrutinize most carefully. But it appears that a frightened party will not allow them to do their job.

This is not to say that Barack Obama is facing a 49-state loss. He is not George McGovern, John McCain is not an incumbent, and 2008 is not 1972. There is every reason to believe that Senator Obama will be competitive all the way through to November. But it is barely April, we are just now learning the candidate's entire personal story, and the possibility remains that additional revelations—both good and bad—await. Insurgent candidacies, even those backed by millions of dollars and a new technology, are inherently risky.

Regardless, the Obama campaign, even if it accomplishes nothing else, will almost certainly succeed in ending the unexpectedly toothless reign of the Super Delegate.

Bill's Chill Pill

Bill Clinton, invoking the slang of his 1990s heyday, told Democrats last week to "chill". Everything, he said, would be all right regardless of how the party's current primary campaign ultimately unfolded. Clinton obviously speaks from a biased perspective—he wants to silence those who insist his wife's perseverance is helping the GOP—but he also understands the dynamics of politics better than most of his peers.

He knows, first and foremost, that this has not been an especially bitter campaign. Nobody has crossed a line from which they cannot retreat. Either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama could endorse the other without having any truly nasty sound bites thrown back in their faces. As I believe I've mentioned before, George H.W. Bush called Ronald Reagan's supply side tax proposals "voodoo economics" back in 1980, yet still ran victoriously as the Gipper's vice presidential running mate. No putdown that memorable has been spoken by either Democratic contender in 2008.

People who care deeply about politics sometimes forget that they live in a bubble of information that is largely unfamiliar to most of their fellow citizens. As high as primary turnout has been this year, the vast majority of Americans are not paying close attention to the current campaign. They do not watch Fox News or CNN or MSNBC. They know that Clinton and Obama are duking it out for the Democratic nomination, but they aren't familiar with too many of the details. These people will make up the majority of the electorate in the general election, and they will be untainted by all the charges and countercharges being leveled at moment.

By now, it is fairly clear how things are going to turn out for the Democrats this summer. Most likely, Barack Obama will hold onto his lead in the popular vote and the delegate count, winning, say, Oregon and North Carolina, and will coast to a fairly easy victory in Denver. Indeed, should that happen, making it fairly clear that even do-overs in Florida and Michigan would not save her, Hillary Clinton will, despite what she says now, probably concede the race prior to the Denver convention.

Many women voters will likely be upset with the treatment Senator Clinton has received from the media and from her fellow Democrats. But there is absolutely nothing about John McCain's testosterone-filled campaign of perpetual international combat that will appeal to the average feminist. McCain may want to woo frustrated independent women with a female vice presidential nominee, but the GOP bench is pretty thin in that department. So given the choice between the most progressive presidential nominee in years and a man who will appoint anti-abortion Supreme Court justices, Hillary Clinton's voters will turn out for Obama.

The other possibility, of course, is that Obama's candidacy will implode, he will lose almost all the rest of the primaries between now and June, and the two Democratic frontrunners will be virtually deadlocked heading into Denver. Should that occur, a movement of Super Delegates in Clinton's favor will not seem nearly as suicidal as it does now. Indeed, if Hillary runs the table for the next ninety days, even many of Obama's supporters will start to get cold feet.

Assuming Obama has not been further tarnished—whatever lead he currently enjoys, he cannot afford another Jeremiah Wright episode—Clinton would, at this point, almost certainly select him as her running mate. This would presumably mute, at least to some degree, the potential outrage from liberal activists and African Americans at Obama's come-from-ahead loss. And a Clinton-Obama ticket would be tough for John McCain to attack or beat (not that he wouldn't try).

Finally, if another scandal causes Obama to go into public opinion freefall, then nobody (except perhaps the Daily Kos dead-enders) could possibly begrudge Senator Clinton the nomination. Indeed, under such circumstances the party would no doubt be grateful for the chance to avoid disaster. Having invested this much in her race for the White House, and having seen the damaging revelations that have faced Senator Obama so far, this possibility may be exactly what keeps Hillary Clinton from throwing in the towel.

The problem with predicting how people will feel in August is that we have no idea what the political landscape will be at that time. Today is April Fool's Day. Just three months ago, when we popped the corks to welcome in the New Year, we had absolutely no idea that we'd be looking at an unresolved, roller-coaster Democratic contest by the end of March. So let's stop worrying about who will or won't be angry when the Democrats select their nominee more than four months from now.

Let's chill with Bill.