Both Senator Muskie and Governor Dean’s meltdowns occurred much earlier in those then much shorter primary seasons. I shouldn’t wonder if the superdelegates mightn’t ask someone like former Vice President Al Gore to accept the nomination, in lieu of either Senator Obama or Clinton, as they are both so badly damaged now. This has to be the strangest election since at least 1968.
Good point. And -- interesting little ancillary "fun factoid," here: did you know that the late Hunter S. Thompson took "credit" in his political writings, years after the fact, for Muskie's untimely teary meltdown?
Thompson's claim was (and I'm doing this solely from memory right now, so let's all hope I'm not screwing things up too badly) that some sort of mood-altering (*kaff*kaff*) "medicine" he'd been toting around at the time had "accidentally" kinda somehow found its way into Muskie's coffee, an hour or so prior to said gent's next (and soon to be famous) scheduled stump speech.
Now, given Thompson's not-infrequent (albeit still darkly entertaining!) tendencies towards... ummmmmm... well... "embroidery," let's say, in much of his work, this really is the sort of claim requiring several doduble handfuls of salt as a chaser, plainly... but: HMMMMMMMMM. ;)
The terrifyingly prescient Mrs.KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle was wondering aloud along precisely those same lines, earlier this evening... although, in her case, substitute "John Edwards" for "Al Gore." ;)