There's Nobody Left to Broker Dems' Convention

No matter how much young political journalists thirst for it, there will be no brokered Democratic Convention this year, argues Jeff Greenfield in Slate: There simply aren’t any brokers left to make a deal. You can forget about your Al Gore and your John Edwards: no Democratic leader is strong enough—and uncommitted superdelegates will be most interested in pleasing scattered constituencies.

"The idea that a cohort of these folks will unify calls to mind the difficulty of herding cats," Greenfield writes of the superdelegates. Truth is, there hasn’t been a brokered convention since Adlai Stevenson became the Dem nominee in 1952. But don’t be so quick to assume the '08 convention won’t be hijacked: It could be even bloodier because it lacks a referee. (More Barack Obama stories.)