All of John McCain’s Republican competitors have dropped out of the race. Well, Ron Paul will still participate in some sort of low-key way (which may include a non-low-key march on Washington!), but Paul has conceded that he hasn’t the proverbial snowball’s chance to knock McCain from the running. McCain has all the delegates he needs; the nomination is sewn up.

Too bad. For if ever a candidate needed unstitching, it’s McCain.

But if you are looking for hope from a Democratic alternative, you might as well dash it right now. There’s nothing particularly freedom-loving, republican, or even democratic about the three major Democratic candidates.

Three, you ask? I must mean two, no?

Nope.

Think Al Gore. You can’t keep a good corpse down.

In a recent column, Eleanor Clift fantasizes about the possibility of dragging Al Gore back from his political Afterlife as a PowerPoint presenter on global warming, to run again for the Number One Spot. Ms. Clift insists that there is no way for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to get the delegates needed for the nomination. That means the super-delegates will decide.

The first thing to say about this is: how amusing! Democrats picking their candidate by the least democratic method possible — behind, as Clift puts it, “closed doors” — is just too rich.

As a person who’s stumped for democratic reforms around the country, I can say that, generally speaking, Democratic politicians tend to be the least interested in democratic reforms like initiative and referendum. They tend to deeply despise them, while Republican politicians — perhaps against one’s expectations — tend to see merit in these tools for reform. At least, more than their Democratic colleagues.

So, the party’s name notwithstanding, the idea of a non-democratic Democratic nomination process isn’t exactly the acme of hypocrisy. It’s just politics as usual.

But Democratic constituents are nowhere near so lockstep anti-democratic as their leaders are. And anything these super-delegates do will not be seen as very “super” by close to half of activist Democrats.

Selecting Hillary? Hillary is a player, as was her husband. The Clinton’s have been courting movers and shakers in the Democratic Party for decades upon decades now. All those Renaissance Weekends might pay off.

But it would surely elicit righteous indignation, even white-hot anger, from Obama supporters, who might very well view the Anointed One as the next worst thing to the Antichrist.

So, might a sort of canny wisdom come into play, as if a Political Muse were to whisper into hundreds of ears, saying Pick Obama?

It might very well happen. Obama may be as unreconstructed a Big Government Liberal as you could fear, but he sounds as if he’s ushering in a new Millennium, with utterly new ideas.

The newness of any one idea is of course not merely open to question, but open to challenge on sanity grounds. But that doesn’t matter for Democrats. Any group that could pick Al Gore and then John Kerry as their standard bearers in the last two elections hasn’t demonstrated a great deal of judgment.

And here we come to the third scenario, where Eleanor Clift’s years of political insidery incite her to insight: If enough super-delegates hold off on deciding, there could be no clear winner on the first ballot. After that anything could happen. And the most likely “anything”? Al Gore.

Gore won the popular vote back in 2000, and if you listen to Democrats, he would have won the Electoral College, too, had the sneaky Bush supporters not nabbed Florida, with the help of a partisan Supreme Court, and snuck in. So selecting Al Gore again could be seen as recompense. Continued...