Monday, August 04, 2008

Never mind.

Predictably, the Obama campaign has moved to avoid a meaningless credentials fight over delegates from Florida and Michigan, proposing to seat them with full voting rights. Since Hillary has announced that she won't be nominated on the floor in Denver, restoring the delegations without contest has absolutely no consequence in terms of the nomination.

There's some rumbling about the implications of this move on the future of the nominating calendar and process. I wouldn't place too much stake in those prospects. While I support seating the delegations at full strength now, it's not because I think they were right then. It's because it just doesn't matter anymore and we're a big tent party. It's time to get over it - until next time, anyway.

As far as next time goes, there will continue to be internal tussles about rules and calendars, caucuses and primaries. I wouldn't count on wholesale changes coming out of this convention, though. After all, the process in question is the one that Obama won. The convention will be, in a sense, a celebration of that process. Obama loyalists will control the convention and its committees, and they're likely to be pretty satisfied with the way things turned out this time around.

Of course, at some point the delegates will, in some pro-forma bit of business, pass the ball to the National Committee for continuing refinement and supervision of the rules for 2012. Whatever's done in Denver, it won't be over. There will be plenty of opportunity for the intramural squabbling that our Party is renowned for, but the convention won't show much evidence of that. We're convening to celebrate Barack. We can fight later.

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