When Ezra Klein and Newt Gingrich agree, watch out!
Klein wrote the following on his blog yesterday about the threat that Hillary Clinton's new superdelegate strategy will rip the party apart:
Put another way: If Hillary Clinton does not win delegates out of a majority of contested primaries and caucuses, her aides are willing to rip the party apart to secure the nomination, to cheat in a way that will rend the Democratic coalition and probably destroy Clinton's chances in the general election...
This demonstrates not only a gross ruthlessness on the part of Clinton's campaign, but an astonishingly cavalier attitude towards the preservation of the progressive coalition.
Surprisingly, Gingrich also warns of a Democratic meltdown in a WSJ op-ed today:
So the Democrats are caught in a double-bind: Disenfranchising the voters in Michigan and Florida while allowing party insiders to pick the party's nominee has all the makings of a Democratic civil war.
You might think that as a Republican I don't have a dog in this fight, but I do. All of us do. A tainted or "stolen" Democratic nomination has the potential to delegitimize the election itself and its outcome. And tainted victories produce hobbled administrations. Much as I might have agreed with the outcome of the 2000 general election, the rancor and vitriol it produced created divisions among Americans where none naturally existed before, irreparably damaging the Bush administration.
Gingrich's solution: Revote in Florida and Michigan. I don't think that's likely, but the threat to unity within the party is real.
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