Primarily confusing

Hillary Rodham Clinton is celebrating her victory over Barack Obama in Texas on Tuesday, though it’s not certain that it was really a victory, because while she won the primary, she has likely lost the state’s subsequent caucus. She’s still about 105 delegates shy of Obama, but the count seems to vary depending on who’s doing the counting. In the end, the Democratic nominee will probably be decided by party insiders called superdelegates.

Is all that perfectly clear?

Americans choose a president every four years, but seldom have the odd anachronisms of our democracy been as plainly exposed as they have been in the 2008 campaign. Few Americans and even fewer foreigners fully understand this arcane process, and nobody can blame them. Some states choose a nominee based on caucuses, others rely on primaries and some, like Texas, use both. At the end of the voting, the nominee isn’t really chosen by the people but by state delegates at the parties’ national conventions. About a fifth of the delegates at this year’s Democratic convention will be unpledged superdelegates who can support whichever candidate they choose rather than being tied to their states’ popular vote. After the parties have picked their candidates, the winner of the general election will once again be chosen by conventioneers -- this time in the electoral college -- rather than voters. This can lead to undemocratic results such as the 2000 presidential race, in which Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush was awarded the presidency.

There is, of course, a simpler way. We could select party nominees by majority vote nationwide, do the same in the general election and skip the conventions. Every once in a while, as in 2000, there are calls to simplify the process. But political inertia is such that they go unheard.

Many Democrats are frustrated by the uncertainty and confusion of the primary campaign, fearing it will put them at a disadvantage during the general election when they face the Republican Party’s clear choice, John McCain. They needn’t fret. The bonus of a close contest is that Clinton and Obama will be squeezed and sniffed like supermarket melons, their ripeness tested by dozens of debates and the pesticides in their past exposed by each other long before McCain gets a chance to start digging. No matter which one wins the nomination, the country will know precisely what it’s getting.

The sustained pressure of the 2008 campaign thus provides a redeeming rationale for our nominating process: It has separated the sturdy from the unelectable. Just ask John Edwards.