Former Democratic senators David Boren of Oklahoma and Sam Nunn of Georgia have a message for Democratic presidential candidates: pay up or else.

Boren and Nunn say that unless the Democrats declare a “unity government” and agree to appoint Republicans as senior cabinet members, they’ll mount a third-party spolier campaign to prevent a Democratic victory. And they’ll do it in the name of civility.

“Say, that’s a real nice-looking house you got there. Shame if something happened to it. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.”

The weapon of choice for these late-blooming gangsters is Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire New York mayor. Bloomberg is an ideal spoiler candidate—centrist, non-threatening and best of all, self-financing. He might be able to siphon off enough Democratic and independent votes to throw the election to whichever monstrosity Republicans nominate without forcing his above-the-fray backers into the demeaning grind of icky retail politics.

Brent Budowsky, a long-time Capitol Hill staffer who now writes at an influential Washington journal, The Hill, has bought into the program big time. Yesterday, in one of the great unconsciously patronizing essays of all time, he endorsed Barack Obama and urged Obama to submit to these Emily Post racketeers.

Budowsky says that “Obama should reach out to Michael Bloomberg, Sen. Chuck Hagel, former Sens. Sam Nunn and David Boren and the supporters of the national unity movement. He should offer a national unity government. He should state his intention to name in his government leading voices of experience such as Sam Nunn for vice president and Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, and speak of these matters before the Super Tuesday voting.”

Well… why? If Chuck Hagel wants to be secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel should find a candidate in his own party who would be willing to appoint him to the post. It really is not Obama’s fault that there aren’t any such candidates, or that Hagel’s party has blown itself up. It is not the responsibility of Democrats to offer consolation prizes, in the form of important cabinet positions, to those few Republicans who have learned to impersonate reasonable people on the occasional issue.

Get a job, Chuck. Oh, wait, you already have a job: as a Republican senator voting with the Republican administration at every opportunity.

And Sam Nunn as vice president? Nunn is best remembered as Ronald Reagan’s most reliable Democratic ally in Congress. His constituency consists of a few hundred Washington pundits and other likewise superannuated politicians; not exactly the stuff coattails are made of. I wish the nature of the impulse to pair a young, vibrant, centrist Midwestern black guy with an aging, irrelevant, Southern conservative white guy escaped me, but it doesn’t.

Here’s a question: if Budowsky thinks Obama is worth endorsing, why does he also think Obama needs minders from the elder statesman set? An endorsement suggests trust in a candidate’s skills and judgement, but Budowsky clearly doesn’t trust Obama to exercise that judgement on his own.

Here’s what a “unity government” would accomplish. Instead of having a purely Democratic administration rabidly opposed by a dwindling band of radical Congressional Republicans, we would have a Democratic administration with a few token “moderate” Republicans rabidly opposed by a dwindling band of radical Congressional Republicans.

I’m not sure I see the advantage in that to anyone other than David Boren and Sam Nunn.

The depth of Boren’s and Nunn’s petulance is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that two of the three leading Democrats have already explicitly said that if elected, they’ll draw on the talent pool in both parties. Clinton has mentioned resurrecting Colin Powell and putting his vast reservoir of credibility to work on her administration’s behalf (and of course her husband actually did appoint a Republican, Bill Cohen, to his cabinet, so there’s a family tradition); Obama has mentioned Dick Lugar, Arnold Schwarzenneger and, yes, Hagel, as potential cabinet appointees in his administration.

So it’s not as though Clinton and Obama are waging war on the concept of bipartisanship; they’re instead pathetically eager to embrace it. But that isn’t enough for Nunn and Boren and their fellow arsonists: they insist that any Democratic administration must go through them, or they’ll light Bloomberg’s fuse and throw him at the election.

That’s a brand of civility to do Tony Soprano proud.

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