‘Count all the votes’ — as long as we win

As Barack Obama clinched the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, the question became: What to do with Hillary Clinton?

Watching that scenario unfold over the coming days and weeks will reveal much about Sen. Obama's strength and his vision for the future.

But in the meantime, it's worth backing up a bit to examine the hypocritical, win-at-all-costs attitude that has dominated the Democratic Party since Al Gore fell short in 2000. It's an attitude that was on full display during the party's acrimonious primary season.

With an unpopular Republican president in the White House, Democrats eagerly anticipated the 2008 primary season. Many Democratic partisans were so eager to "have a voice" in the nomination that states began jockeying for early primary positions -- the better to impact selection of the Democratic nominee.

To maintain order in the process -- and to pressure affiliate state parties not to hold presidential preference votes before the traditionally first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary-- the Democratic National Committee last year declared any states holding earlier tallies would find themselves stripped of their nominating votes at the party's national convention.

Keeping their word longer than is typical for their candidates once elected, Democratic Party leaders waited till last Saturday to backtrack on that vow, bartering a bizarre compromise in which the delegates from Michigan and Florida -- the two states that defied party leaders by holding early primaries -- will each be allowed to cast "half" a vote for their choice of presidential nominee.

Since front-running Sen. Obama didn't even place his name on the Michigan primary ballot, supporters of Sen. Clinton argued all that state's "half" votes should go to her.

Sen. Obama's supporters reportedly had enough votes on the party's rules committee to push through a 50-50 split of Michigan's 128 delegates. But -- counting enough votes for his inevitable Tuesday victory, anyway -- the Obama forces compromised Saturday, allowing 69 delegates for Sen. Clinton and 59 for Sen. Obama.

Numerous Clinton voters in the Washington audience expressed disapproval even of that compromise, shouting, "Count all the votes!"

It's a frequently heard Democratic slogan, though one that seems subject to flexible interpretations, depending on the circumstance.

Democratic leaders are famously impatient with proposals that states should be given extra time to count mail-in ballots from U.S. military personnel overseas, which can take weeks to arrive even if postmarked by the date required. Could that possibly be because U.S. military personnel tend to vote Republican by a considerable margin?

And, in an interview published in the May 31 Wall Street Journal, minor party candidate Ralph Nader recalls that, "The Democratic National Committee filed 24 lawsuits in 18 states in 12 weeks in '04 to get us off the ballot."

Worried lest he draw even a single vote from their nominee, the "Count all the votes!" Democrats can be relied upon to file similar legal challenges against Mr. Nader's candidacy again this election cycle -- despite the iconoclastic consumer advocate's infinitessimal standing in the polls.

Republicans have rarely shown any comparable slash-and-burn vindictiveness over "third party" candidates believed to draw more voters from their side, usually including the Libertarian Party and most notably in the case of the 1992 campaign of entrepreneur H. Ross Perot, whose vote totals allowed Bill Clinton to reach the White House without a popular majority.

There are two problems with "Count all the votes!"

The first is that politicians of both stripes increasingly forget, these days, that most of the major decisions in our lives were supposed to be immune from government meddling.

The second problem is that -- in practice among Democrats -- the slogan seems to mean, "Count all the votes that are likely to go to our candidate."

And slam the door on the rest.