OK, let us make the 3rd assumption. It comes down to the Convention, and neither Obama or Hilary is budging. This is not a huge assumption, IMHO.
So, the Convention turns to Gore. 
Obama voters- do you accept Gore?
Hilary voters- do you?
If your candidate was chosen as Veep- would that change your mind?
As an Obama supporter, I’d certainly vote for Gore, and in fact my ideal ticket is Gore/Obama. However, it’s not going to happen, for the following reasons:
Forgive me, Opal and others, I couldn’t resist.
But now the Popular vote is a virtual tie, and one can even count it so Hilary is ahead!
If it isn’t Gore, then how to break the deadlock? Of course, one or the other could do something really stupid in the next couple of months.
Vote for Gore over McCain? Sure. I don’t know that I’d expect wonderful things out of Gore but I’d at least have faith that he can hold the fort down for 4-8 years.
Coin flip? There are a million ways this can go down which don’t so brazenly waste and cruelly mock all the voter effort and energy that has been expended so far. Tossing aside one of Clinton or Obama is perhaps tough, but certainly necessary; tossing aside both is a great way for the Democrats to shoot themselves in the foot yet again.
I think Al Gore is awesome, but explain to me how this isn’t the worst idea ever… Clinton and Obama campaigned, raised money, got more people to the polls than any other primary candidates ever… and you bring in the guy who “lost” it two cycles ago?
If both candidates were extremely unpopular and polled poorly vs. McCain, that might be an idea. But there are a lot of voters who will vote for their candidate because they love Obama or Hillary. Removing both of them would seriously fuck the Dems up. And I’m not sure if Gore’s appeal at this time is quite as strong as either C or O. Gore is respected so much now because he’s not in politics.
I’ve been sitting out these threads, but here’s my thinking:
I might vote for Obama. I won’t vote for Clinton, Gore, McCain, or anybody else the major parties are likely to nominate. And as many of us have said before, it’d be an awful idea for the Democrats to nominate someone who isn’t even running right now. It’d show them to be even more clueless and dysfunctional than they already look.
Neither of them will have to budge. It’s like the final two in Survivor; other people get to pick which player wins the grand prize. The delegates will decide which candidate they want to be the nominee and vote accordingly. And I don’t foresee a deadlock among the delegates. Clinton and Obama are actually pretty close ideologically, so it’s not like there’s some unbridgeable divide between two halves of the Democratic Party.
Didn’t we do this already?
I would vote for Gore over McCain, but not Hillary over McCain.
Why do people keep bringing this up? It’s not even a remote possibility. You might as well ask “what if Cap’n Crunch got the nod?”
I would happily vote for the re-election of Al Gore.
Actually, you can’t. That’s why all this talk about “What if they can’t decide?” is idiotic. Obama is winning in every metric that’s measurable and the DNC is not stupid enough to reward Hillary for losing by making her the winner.
I would vote for McCain if Hillary was the nominee. Although now I’m leaning towards Cap’n Crunch. He’d probably have a “Grreat!” running mate.
Sure, you can. It just involves special techniques from the field of Advanced Idiocy, such as counting Michigan (Hillary, 328,309 votes; Obama, 0 votes), and not counting caucuses because they’re not representative or something.
At any rate, Little Nemo @8 is quite correct: there will be no ‘tie’ because the superdelegates will vote, the remaining handful of Edwards delegates will surely vote for either Hillary or Obama on the second ballot if there is one, and the convention will pick a winner from the set {Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton}.
Nobody needs to budge, and no third candidate needs to be added to that set in order to resolve this non-conundrum.
Not only can you, they have. RealClearPolitics, a fairly unbiased and widely respected source has listed six ways of counting the popular vote:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/democratic_vote_count.html
Popular Vote Total 14,418,691 49.2% 13,917,393 47.5% Obama +501,298 +1.7%
Estimate w/IA, NV, ME, WA* 14,752,775 49.3% 14,141,255 47.2% Obama +611,520 +2.1%
Popular Vote (w/FL) 14,994,905 48.3% 14,788,379 47.6% Obama +206,526 +0.7%
Estimate w/IA, NV, ME, WA* 15,328,989 48.4% 15,012,241 47.4% Obama +316,748 +1.0%
Popular Vote (w/FL & MI)** 14,994,905 47.4% 15,116,688 47.8% Clinton +121,783 +0.4%
Estimate w/IA, NV, ME, WA* 15,328,989 47.5% 15,340,550 47.5% Clinton +11,561 +0.03%
In two of the six, Hilary comes out ahead.
Note that I make no such claim- I consider the popular vote a virtual tie.
How evenhanded of you.
The difference between RCP and you is that RCP proffers no value judgments on the different ways of counting. They’re providing a service to their audience, some of whom, for whatever reasons, are curious as to what the numbers look like when you add in the literally one-sided Michigan numbers.
There are two possible reasons that I can think of to consider the popular vote in general. One is to get at some sort of truth about who’s got more support from the rank-and-file. Including Hillary’s 328,309 Michigan votes and Obama’s 000,000 Michigan votes is obviously completely misleading in this regard, and gets us farther from any such truth than if we had left Michigan out.
The other is to come up with some sort of abstruse scoring system that has some connection to the popular vote in the primaries and caucuses, but that puts one’s candidate in better shape than the abstruse scoring system with those properties that we’ve already got, the one by which the nomination will officially be decided, i.e. the delegate count.
If there’s a third I haven’t considered, the floor is yours.
That’s “Hillary” not ‘Hilary’ for one. 
Yes, I’d vote for Gore. It’d be nice sweet revenge in that W would then hand over power to the guy that should have had it handed over to him by Bill in the first place.
My ideal ticket, by the way, would be Clinton/Gore.
By the way, she’s ahead by about 120,000 votes. Michigan’s votes that didn’t go to her should be divided between Edwards and Obama but even being generous to Obama and counting ALL of the 45% that voted against Hill still gets her ahead by over 100,000 as of right now. Fact remains: more have voted for her than him.
Oh, look. Indiana and North Carolina.
How many people coming out, you think?
No one can win without 2,204 delegates. No one can currently get 2,024 delegates without SuperDelegates. If winning by SuperDelegates is “stealing” then *neither *can win legit. In other words, The Obama-ites who claim that winning by gaining superdelegates would be going against the “will of the people” and there’d be a rebellion or rioting in the streets or whatever :rolleyes: have just said that if their Candidate wins, he’s doing so “against the will of the people”.
The chance to win the Nomination at the ballot box has passed. Neither Obama or Hillary can possibly do so.
As long as Gore wants to do it, sure, I’d be entirely happy with him both as nominee and as President, just as I’ve thought since the 1988 primaries. But if his heart isn’t in it anymore, he would no longer be a good choice. And, we’d be treated to a lot more of that “he says he invented the Internet” nonsense.