I suspect that one of the reasons that political parties and their candidates for office behave so irresponsibly is that they never accept responsibility for their actions. Norm points to this Jeff Weintraub post that clearly demonstrates not only that politicians don't accept responsibility, but that they are encouraged to evade it.

As you all know, back in 2007 delegates from Florida and Michigan were excluded from this year's Democratic convention because those states broke the Democratic Party's rules by scheduling their primaries in January 2008. . .

And at the time, no doubt, the rather draconian penalty imposed by the DNC may not have seemed like a big deal, since no one even considered the possibility that the nomination might still be contested when convention time rolled around. . .

No solution at this point can be perfect, since much of the damage has already been done, and any effort to repair it after the fact is bound to create new problems. But the least bad solution, on grounds of fairness, democratic principle, and pragmatic realpolitik, would be to re-run the primaries in both states.

This is nonsense, of course. There's nothing fair about do-overs. The fairness argument is an appeal to bias rather than any sort of real argument. Every single primary has as good a claim to a mulligan, and would still have such a claim afterward.

But, in real life your actions have consequences and you must accept responsibility for them. The claims that the voters of Florida and Michigan are somehow disenfranchised are ridiculous. They all knew the rules when they decided to break them. The DNC also has no excuse, since it knew the consequences of its rulings when they were made. The only thing that allowed the series of decisions to be made as they were is that they all thought they would never be held responsible for them. That should not be encouraged by declaring a do-over.

Even if we leave aside considerations of abstract "fairness," which I think are ambiguous at best, it would be monumental folly for the Democratic Party to simply shut out Michigan and Florida entirely from the convention, thus alienating a great many voters in those states, merely for the satisfaction of punishing the state parties (and the Clinton campaign). . .

No, let's get real: The Democratic Party had better come up with some workable solution that can (somehow) command consensus and also mollify potentially disaffected Democratic voters in Michigan and Florida. Any such solution would have to be a package deal that included both states, for reasons that I don't think need to be spelled out. And any new contest in each state should take a form as close as possible to what would have happened if the two state parties had played by the Democratic Party's rules in the first place.

The folly happened months ago. What Weintraub calls getting real is in fact getting unreal: reality is suspended. This attempt to paper over the real state of the Democratic party is not in the interest of the nation. That should be the first consideration. But no.

[E]veryone in the Democratic Party should be working feverishly to avoid a wildly divisive and globally televised floor fight at the convention over seating delegates.

Why? It's already happening. It's reality. Why try to conceal it? Will this history be revised, airbushed away?

At the moment, many complications stand in the way--financial and logistical as well as political. Those practicalities would require a long discussion, which I will avoid getting into right now. The Democrats may well blow it ... but according to the old saying, politics is supposed to be the art of the possible, so I hope they can manage to work out a stop-gap solution (and there are some signs that they might be able to do this).

Then they have until 2012 to try to fix the system. (Good luck!)

Yours for democracy,
Jeff Weintraub

If Weintraub was truly for democracy he could not have written the post as it is. Everything he says is an attempt to subvert democracy for the advancement of Democrats.

We the people learn about the candidates and their parties during campaigns. Is this a party that is ready to govern? It doesn't seem so. The fact that their opponents seem no better doesn't change this. Now, as much as ever, we need divided government. They are all so incompetent and venal that it is in the national interest to impede them as much as possible within the structure of our institutions. I'd say that if you think that the Democrats will hold congress then you should vote for a Republican President; and the reverse.