We are now one day removed from the meleé of Super Tuesday and we find ourselves with a pretty solid number for who has how many delegates. Currently Barack Obama leads Hillary Clinton by five pledged delegates (635 to 630) but Hillary leads by 82 overall with super delegates.
The question of where they came from was a quick topic at my Democracy for New York City meeting tonight in the West Village, unfortunately most of the two hours I spent there felt like being in a perverted debate on the set of Hannity and Colmes. Basically the candidate diary wars of DailyKos occur just as much if not more so and more heated (at least you can't raise your voice on the Internet, and no, spelling things out in CAPS doesn't count). So as I left there as people started screaming and the rate of punditry per minute exceeded my limit for what are usually quiet and productive gatherings, I continued my thought about the super delegates and this is what I found.
From The Nation:
By 1980 the party establishment had seen enough. It struck back with a commission of its own, led by North Carolina Governor James Hunt. It returned power to elected officials and party regulars--the superdelegates, who will make up about 20 percent of the 4,049 delegates at the Democratic convention. They include all Democratic members of Congress and every governor, but roughly half of them are Democratic National Committee officials elected by state parties, who range from top party operatives to local city council members. Key interests in the party, like labor groups, can also name superdelegates. According to political scientist Rhodes Cook, superdelegates were created as a "firewall to blunt any party outsider that built up a head of steam in the primaries."That's what happened in 1984, when Senator Gary Hart launched an insurgent challenge to front-runner Walter Mondale. Hart won sixteen state primaries and caucuses to Mondale's ten, and barely lost the popular vote. Yet Mondale locked up virtually all the party's 700 or so superdelegates even before the primary began. Hart likely would have lost anyway, but the superdelegates sealed his defeat. "I got almost none of them, because [Mondale] was considered inevitable," Hart told me.
What happened to Gary Hart was a true tragedy, the Democratic Party was as undemocratic as it could be. So now lets fast-forward to 2008 and here we have a close contest between the establishment candidate and the relative outsider. Now Howard Dean announced last night that he does not want to see a brokered convention, and that an agreement should be made after the voters are done deciding delegates in June. This would be a bad thing if the undemocratic super-delegates were considered part of the process, but then again, they'll have the same influence during the convention in August. And do you know what type of effect they'll make on the outcome?
The obvious beneficiary of the superdelegates this time around is another establishment favorite, Hillary Clinton. Before Super Tuesday, Obama had sixty-three pledged delegates, compared with Clinton's forty-eight. But as we went to press Clinton had a huge advantage in superdelegates, 184 to ninety-five, according to CNN. "Many of the superdelegates were in and out of the Clinton White House, invited to dinners, have received contributions from Clinton allies," says Hart, who has endorsed Obama. "There will be pressure brought to bear to cash in those chips."
Clinton has a wealth of contacts to tap, in the party and in her campaign. There's the former President himself, of course, and Clinton's campaign chair, Terry McAuliffe, who ran the DNC from 2001 to 2005, and a top Clinton surrogate, Harold Ickes, who serves on the DNC's influential rules committee. The Clintons are working hard to bring the large bloc of uncommitted superdelegates into the senator's camp. "I know Hillary is calling superdelegates regularly, which is a smart play," says Art Torres, California Democratic Party chair. Interviews with superdelegates in Alabama, California, Colorado and Massachusetts--a random sample of February 5 states--illustrate this close attention. After Ramona Martinez, a Denver city councilwoman, switched her support from Bill Richardson to Clinton, she received immediate thank-you calls from McAuliffe and Clinton adviser Ann Lewis. In Alabama "Hillary would get the majority of the superdelegates," predicts state party chair Joe Turnham. "A lot of it is longstanding relationships. People go back to the 1980s with Bill Clinton, when he first came to Alabama."
So even in Alabama, a state Barack carried, the super delegates could conceivably cast their vote for Hillary. Is this a system you endorse? I definitely disagree with this crap. It was devised by the establishment to protect them against the likes of Jimmy Carter and George McGovern and help people like Walter Mondale (guess who he's endorsing this year).
Dean has to know that if Clinton wins this year, his time at the DNC is up. If he wants to do anything and get away with dignity, it would be to abolish the system of super delegates. It wouldn't happen this year, but it needs to end as soon as possible. We are the Democratic Party and supposedly we are the people's party....so let the people decide who the nominee is and then the idea of a brokered convention decided by ex-Presidents, City Councilors and party favorites would be a thing of the past.
|