Presidential conventions. Yawn. Or maybe not.

Fun suggestion that this year's Democratic nomination race might well go all the way to the convention - and then to multiple ballots - before someone becomes the winner. This would be the first time since 1960 that the Democratic nomination wasn't decided until the convention, and since 1952 that a convention went to more than one ballot. Likely? Probably not. But it would make the convention interesting for a change. (So long as it's not exciting, the way the 1968 convention was.)

The article suggests that this year's race has some factors that, combined, make a longer race for the nomination possible: Proportional voting (instead of winner-take-all), so that someone who wins with a 25 percent plurality only gets 25 percent of the state's delegates, instead of all of them, and that second-and third-place candidates will get some delegates out of the state (anyone with at least 15 percent of the vote receives delegates); persistent candidates, so that the leading 5 or 6 candidates may well stay in the race through Super Tuesday (March 2), by which time about half of the delegates will have been chosen and divided up among those five or six; and an odd front-loading of primaries, designed to give a single candidate an aura of inevitability, this year may split enough among the leaders so that no such positive aura is generated. As a result, the leader may reach the convention with less than 40 percent of the delegates, and two or three other candidates each have enough delegates that a deal is possible to come up with the requisite 50 percent - and might lead to your choice of a ticket, either person on top, among Dean, Clark, Gephardt, and Kerry.

And this article notes that once a brokered convention becomes a real possibility, it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because there is no incentive for a fourth-or fifth-place candidate to drop out when he can stay in the race, make it to the convention, and his pool of delegates can become a valuable bargaining chip - and if he drops out any earlier, he'll have nothing of value left.