Not with a bang, but a simper

So this is how the Democratic presidential nominating process will end: in the back rooms of the convention in Denver. One room will be where the credentialing committee (which I understand is made up of three former members of Bill Clinton's administration) will decide whether/how to give voting power to delegates from Florida and Michigan--delegates that Billary received the majority of in primary voting that wasn't supposed to count due to those states' violation of the Democratic National Committee's rules against too-early primaries; and the other room where the hundreds of "super delegates" determine who they're going to cast their votes for.



Some of the latter will likely be swayed by which candidate has won the most delegates in the various primaries and caucuses around the nation. They'll also be swayed by their hunch about which of the two candidates is more likely to beat McCain, and by their sense of which one is more likely to bring more voters to the polls for more local contests. On both these last two items, Obama's the clear winner--and perhaps on the first as well, unless the credentialing committee decides to award to Clinton the bulk of the Michigan and Florida delegates that were chosen in their respective "outlaw" primaries.

Notwithstanding the "reforms" of the 1970's in the delegate-choosing method of the Democrats, the more things change, the more they stay the same.