The silver lining and the cloud over this election season

Even though the extended Democratic battle for the nomination is polarizing strong supporters of the two candidates (including talk of voting for McCain instead of the other), the battle is actually a good thing. That's the opinion of Markos Moulitsas in a commentary in Newsweek. Moulitsas runs the Democratic political blog www.dailykos.com. He lists these benefits of the battle: Both candidates are into frenzied organization in every state, even Red states. Election officials in many states are reporting record turnout and record new registrations for Dems. The national party can take over the infrastructure the candidates built, solidifying Blue states and tilting the odds in swing states. Even Texas (gasp!) appears up for grabs. The attention is helping other national, state, and local elections. Finally, it has made Obama a better candidate, his battles against Hillary are teaching him how to face the GOP in the fall and how to diffuse explosive issues (like race) now instead of in October.

As for Hillary… If she forces her way to the nomination through a coup of superdelegates she will destroy the party by alienating all the young voters, the next generation, who have flocked to Obama. It is one thing for the people to nominate Hillary over Obama, it is quite another for party bigwigs to defy the wishes of the people. Superdelegates are (or at least should be) smart enough to recognize that outcome and prevent it.

Along that line are not one, but two companion articles in Newsweek about people who might tell Hillary it is time to concede. One is Vernon Jordan, the Friend of Bill who got Monica a job out of town. The other is Rahm Emanuel, representative of Chicago and friend to both Hillary and Obama. Doubts of Hillary's fitness for prez. if Newsweek has articles about two people who might be needed to tell her to give it up.

In spite of all this interest in the campaign and election process, there continue to be efforts to restrict who can vote under false claims of protecting the integrity of the election. These restrictions include proof of citizenship, voter ID, registration drive restrictions, database cleansing, and various methods of challenging the voter. All of these efforts seemed focused on minority (read: Democratic) voters.

All these shenanigans (and more) are going to need a strong Federal Elections Commission, but the FEC has been rendered even more toothless than usual. The FEC normally has 6 members, 3 from each party. At the moment it has 2, evenly split. Without a quorum of 4 it can't open investigations or hand down rulings. Members are usually voted on in pairs so that neither party can claim favoritism. There are two Dem nominees, but only one GOP, Hans von Spakovsky, so blatantly partisan and disinterested in fairness that the Dems refuse to vote for him (hint: he got is training in the thoroughly corrupt voting-rights section of the Justice Department and had been on the FEC for two years as a recess appointment). Bush refuses to nominate a second GOP until Spakovsky is voted on. A second nominee would allow one of the Dems to be voted in. One would think this is intentional. Thus the FEC cannot rule whether McCain should be reprimanded for saying he wants to take public financing and then blow past his spending limit.