Give it Up

Via Publius, Sean Wilentz has an exceedingly weak piece arguing that Clinton would be the easy winner in any fair primary system. Now, the primary system is full of irrationalities, so one might think that it would be possible to come up with a decent argument, but alas he fails at the task. Rather, the core of his argument is to assert again and again that the GOP winner-take-all model is the only fair way of apportioning delegates because…that’s how we do it in Presidential elections! But, of course, winner-take-all plurality voting is notoriously the least accurate of vote count systems commonly used in liberal democracies, and it is precisely that feature that led to the popular vote winner losing in 2000 and given different weather patterns in Ohio could have very easily led to the popular vote winner losing in 2004. Indeed, not using winner-take-all is one of the very few defensible aspects of the current primary system, and certainly Wilentz doesn’t even begin to make an argument about why PR is so much worse as to render the winner illegitimate (and I’m not counting “we do it that way in other parts of our anachronistic election system” as an argument.)

And, indeed, it gets worse: Obama is attacked for refusing to certify the results of an election which 1)the authoritative decision maker declared in advance would not count, 2)all candidates agreed not to campaign in, and 3)only one major candidate appears on the ballot. (I can’t wait for Wilentz’s piece next week railing against people who claim that Dimitry Medvedev’s election is illegitimate: after all, lots of people voted! That’s the only criterion that counts!) In general, the whole article reminds me of Wilentz asserting that JFK would have benefited from a much greater halo effect than LBJ…without being assassinated.