Memory Lapse.(The Talk of the Town)(election primaries)

The precise origins of Memorial Day are a little fuzzy. According to one version, it was first celebrated in 1865, a few weeks after Lee surrendered to Grant; freed slaves and black and white Union soldiers marched to the site of a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Charleston, South Carolina, for some hearty hymn-singing and picnicking. Others place its beginnings in Waterloo, New York, a year later, while still others date it to 1868 and a proclamation by the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Northern veterans' organization. What no one disputes is that the holiday's founding purpose was to honor the Civil War's fallen.

This year, thanks to HBO, the remembrances of the Memorial Day weekend encompassed another American civil war, happily less lethal to its combatants but far from trivial in its consequences: the election of 2000. HBO's movie "Recount" has fewer shrinks than "The Sopranos" and fewer laughs than "Curb Your Enthusiasm," but its over-all factual accuracy has been attested to by close observers of the events it portrays. It reminds us of some essential truths about the election and its aborted recount: that more Floridians went to their polling places to vote for Al Gore than for George W. Bush; that a full and fair count would have confirmed the voters' preference; that the White House was awarded to Bush, the half-million-vote loser across the nation, by a 5-4 Supreme Court diktat. The injustice of Bush v. Gore was obvious at the time; its sequel has proved it to be a tragedy.

The stock defense of Justice Antonin Scalia is a three-word sneer: "Get over it." Many people find themselves unable to take this bracing advice. The wound to the country's civic health remains fresh, though of course it is active, committed Democrats who feel it most keenly.

In the current Presidential primary campaign, as in the Electoral College, the "popular vote" has no official sig-nificance. According to the Party's rules, the nomination will go to whoever can garner a majority of the delegates at the Convention in Denver, regardless of how many voters or caucus-goers sent them there, or didn't. (The so-called superdelegates, who make up a fifth of the Convention, represent voters only in the highly attenuated sense of having earlier won public or party office.) Yet the popular vote, however juridically meaningless, carries immense moral and political weight with Democrats, for whom the 2000 travesty is a station of the cross and vote-counting a kind of sacrament. The superdelegates understand this. That's why it has been clear all along that if one of the candidates is able to claim an indisputable majority of actual flesh-and-blood Democrats it will be difficult to deny him--or her--the nomination. But what if the majority is highly disputable, and everybody has one?

"We're winning the popular vote," Hillary Clinton said last week, after prevailing in the Kentucky primary by a margin bigger than that by which she lost in Oregon. "More people have voted for me than for anyone who has ever run for the Democratic nomination." These statements must be read with the sort of close grammatical and definitional care that used to inform her husband's descriptions of his personal entanglements. They are not quite true in the normal sense, but if made under oath they would not be prosecutable for perjury, either.

In a nominating process, especially this one, the "popular vote" is an elusive phenomenon. RealClearPolitics.com, an independent Web site whose numbers political reporters and operatives tend to trust, maintains six separate tallies. At the moment, Obama leads in four of them. With or without participants in the caucus states of Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington (i.e., ...