Please enjoy this guest post by a FOD (Friend of DoubleSpeak):

The National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournaments require a team to win six games over several weeks. The Democratic National Committee requires a candidate to win 2,025 delegates over a period of many months. In basketball, there is no set number of points a team must score, they simply must score more than their opponent. In the Democratic nominating contest, however, until a candidate gets to the magic number, the game must go on. This is the current situation: barring an unforeseen political gaffe of epic proportions, a scandal, or a tremendous moment of political brilliance, neither Senator Obama nor Senator Clinton is likely to secure the requisite number of delegates through the remaining nominating contests, creating a March Madness just for the Democrats.

Unlike the basketball March Madness, the political March Madness has no controlling body, like the NCAA, that sets clear rules and enforces them to run an efficient tournament. The Democratic National Committee’s Rules Committee effectively assured that Republican legislatures in states like Florida could wreak havoc on the legitimacy of the Democratic process. So instead of having selected a nominee with a finite number of contests left to decide the race, the Democrats are now embroiled in an intra-party squabble over which of a half a dozen metrics should be used to decide when the game is over. And instead of the DNC deciding, each team is putting forth their best argument for why the game should end or continue.

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The Clinton campaign, from the grassroots volunteer to the spouse of the candidate, argue that keeping the contest going is not only good for the party, but will be good for the eventual nominee. President Clinton has advised Democrats calling for an end to the campaign to “chill out,” to acknowledge that neither Democrat is a lock to win the general election, and to continue to support this race with no end. Not only is President Clinton’s contention empirically untrue in politics – that rough, drawn out primaries are good for the general election candidate – it is empirically untrue in sports. No fan would argue that her team should have to play triple overtime games to get to the finals, while her team’s eventual opponent should be allowed to end games in the third quarter. Scrimmages of the best offense versus the best defense might help a team get stronger, but full-contact games, played day after day, will inevitably grind down a starting roster. More to the point, the longer a game a team has to play, the more game tape their opponents get, and the more chances their opponents will have to identify their weaknesses and neutralize their strengths.

For Clinton’s argument to be true, the excitement generated by the Democratic primaries would need to have the capacity to be bottled by the eventual nominee and re-used in the general election. The problem is that the Clinton campaign is not using a positive, empowering message to drive up their supporters. Instead, they are relying on a mix of “us versus them” – the idea that it is the Obama campaign and his supporters, not the requisite delegate math and the DNC rules, that is calling for a close to the contest – while seeding doubt and mistrust among lower income white voters that Obama is just another candidate too unfamiliar to be trusted. Both of these streams of rhetoric will turn voters out to vote in primaries, but neither will help Obama if he is the eventual nominee. Excitement in a party’s primary is good for that party in the general only if that excitement hasn’t turned into visceral infighting that will cause the losing side to flee the party or stay home on election day. For proof of these negative effects, look no further than recent polls showing the distrust between Obama and Clinton supporters. More Democratic voters than at any time in the contest are ready to support McCain over the other Democratic candidate in a general election.

After each round of March Madness basketball games, the winning teams get several days off before their next performance. Even die hard fans would insist that their beloved teams needed time to heal and rest before their next contest. In the same vein, the Clinton campaign should think long and hard about the prospects of stretching the primary fight all the way to the end of August. The Democratic nominee this year will need extra time to appease the other side’s base supporters, to mend the rifts inside the party before November. The remaining states on the nominating schedule are not necessarily the states in which a Democratic candidate would choose to spend time towards winning the general election.

The Clinton campaign has changed its sights to a strategy based on stretching out the race until Obama makes some horrendous gaffe or enough blood is drawn from him that he chooses to relent rather than face more attacks. It’s disguised as an interest in “counting every vote” and “making sure Obama is tough enough to face the vast right-wing conspiracy.” This strategy is effective because Obama can’t score enough points to win the game without some outside intervention. There is no game clock at this point, until a sufficient number of superdelegates decide that they’ve seen enough. At some point, the Clintons’ argument about making Obama stronger has to give way to giving Obama some time to rest, to reflect on lessons learned, and to get ready for the general election. At some point, responsible leaders of the Democratic Party have to say that enough time has lapsed, enough shots have been taken, and that it’s clear a winner has emerged. The longer they wait, the greater the risk that for wont of the greatest scrimmage ever played, the championship game was lost.