The Brokered Convention Is No More
Why the Democrats won’t have one Slate.com
By Jeff Greenfield
It is a dream that emerges every presidential cycle, as a gaggle of candidates begin the trek. It grows as polls show no clear leader and the primaries split between the contenders. It has taken on unexpected strength this year because of the realization that neither Sen. Hillary Clinton nor Sen. Barack Obama has any plausible chance of capturing the nomination based on elected delegates by the time the primaries end. And if Clinton wins impressively in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, the dream will sprout new wings.
“Yes!” proclaim the under-60 journalists, sick of their elders’ late-night reminiscences of the challenge to George McGovern’s California delegation in 1972, or Ronald Reagan’s fruitless campaign for Rule 16(c) in 1976. “Yes! We will live to see it—the brokered convention!”
The scenarios are blossoming: Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen conjures a pre-convention convention of undecided superdelegates; Time magazine’s Joe Klein imagines the uncommitted supers abstaining, thus depriving either contender of a nomination and leading to a Gore-Obama ticket. Former West Wing producer and senatorial aide Lawrence O’Donnell Jr. offers a movie treatment in New York magazine that portrays a tough-as-nails Obama besting Clinton by putting Gen. Wes Clark on his ticket.
There’s a subtle but important wrinkle in all of this: We may actually have a plausible shot at a contested convention this summer, but there’s almost no chance at all of a brokered convention—mostly because there are no brokers, and there haven’t been any for quite a while. [more]