DEMOCRACY? NOT REALLY

You saw, I guess, that Barack Obama, not Hillary Clinton, won Texas. He ended up with five more delegates, though she won the primary by 51 percent to 48 percent.

A woman and Hillary supporter -- which is not always redundant -- asked me what was democratic about that. She wanted me to take a stab at justifying, if I could, that nutty and unique two-step process in Texas.

Caucuses began in the evening after people had already voted that day in the primary, with the caucuses counting for one-third and the primary two-thirds.

Some people had enough trouble getting to a polling place during the day, the woman said. To ask shut-ins and the less-privileged (lean-Hillary demographic groups) to get out again that night, perhaps to stay past midnight at what were wild and contentious affairs, was outrageous, she said. Those best able to get out at night tended to be Obama's younger and more vigorous admirers, she said.

The effect, she complained, was that some people in Texas got to vote twice, and others only once, and most of the double-voters were Obama supporters.

The woman was highly irked. These Hillary people stay that way about half the time.

There is only one real justification. It's that those were the rules.

Texas was allowed to choose its delegate-selection process. No candidate got blind-sided. One, though, had a distinct advantage, for all the reasons cited by the complaining Hillary supporter, as well as other reasons.

One is that Obama's campaign consistently has out-shone Clinton's, from money-raising to getting out the vote. Part of the reason is that Hillary thought she'd have the nomination locked up after Feb. 5. She didn't need a plan after that, including for Texas' caucuses, or so she thought.

One test of any political campaign is whether it can adapt to the rules of competition.

One way to judge a potential presidency is to judge the competence of the campaign for it.

Sometimes you have no option but to accept the nature of the cookie's crumble.

There is one other factor, if not so much a justification. It's that we don't have a democracy in America, and never have, certainly not in a direct or true form.

You could take that up with President Al Gore. You could take it up with John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and all those other founding fathers.

They provided a mere democratic component to an over-arching form of representative rule. They set up presidential elections to be decided not by the people, but by specially selected "electors."

We like the people's participation in America. We desire it. We advocate it. We treasure it.

But we don't want to get in a position of being wholly reliant on it.

In that regard, both modern parties have imposed procedures to lend the establishment's will and insiders' order to the nominating processes, thereby limiting any unprotected exposure to the risks of the direct democratic component.

The Republicans have winner-take-all primaries to keep runners-up from staying in the race too long by taking consistent percentages of delegates.

Mike Huckabee nearly won Missouri, but got zero delegates to show for it.

Democrats rely on caucuses that purposely place a premium on organization and fervor instead of garden-variety votes. Then, since the 1980s, the Democrats have had these superdelegates, who exist to repair any unacceptable verdicts reached by voters.

The woman and Hillary supporter made a strong case that the Texas caucuses and all the other caucuses -- nearly all of them won by Obama -- were undemocratic. But so what? Nobody ever said we eschewed the undemocratic.

John Brummett, an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock, is author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.