Gentle Reader -- You are welcome to peruse my web-based journal. I assure you that my contributions to this medium will be both infrequent and inconsequential. Read on!

SUPERDELEGATES

There's been a lot of this kind of horseshit spread around recently:

This is not a negotiable position. If the Democratic Party does not
nominate the candidate for POTUS that the majority (or plurality) of its
participants in primaries and caucuses want it to nominate, then I will quit the
Democratic Party. If you think this is somehow rejecting the rules and bylaws of
the Democratic Party, you are wrong. The fact is that there is nothing in the
bylaws of the Democratic Party that dictate how super delegates should vote at
the Democratic national convention. In the absence of any legal dictation of how
they should vote, I will hold them to the principles that make me a Democrat: as
the democratic institution through which internal disputes of the American
center-left are resolved. If the Democratic Party fails to respect those
principles, and their "super" delegates nominate someone for POTUS other than
the person who received the most support during Democratic primaries and
caucuses, then I fail to see any reason to continue participating in the
Democratic Party. If the Democratic Party is not a democratic institution, then
to hell with the Democratic Party.

I need to get this down before the entire campaign changes, because it seems to do so overnight, these days: Superdelegates have been a part of the Democratic party primary system for a long time. Since the 1980s, I believe. Hillary and Bill didn't think it up all on their own.

You need 2000-odd delegates to win the nomination. They can be regular delegates. They can be superdelegates. The winner will have a mix -- mathematically, I think the winner has to have both.

If Hillary is behind in regular delgates and gets enough superdelegates to win, she wins. Period. If she's ahead in regular delegates, and Obama gets put over the top by supers, he wins. Period. Either one could happen. Do you know what they call a candidate in that situation? The nominee. There is no legitimate way to resolve it otherwise.

Is it ideal? Does it make people feel warm and fuzzy about all those votes they just cast? Does it validate all those nights spent watching MSNBC waiting for primary/caucus results? Does it reflect a pure form of direct democracy? No on all counts.

But those are the rules. They may be bad, stupid rules, but they are the rules. They were in place long before this cycle. For whatever reason, the rulemakers deliberately eliminated direct democracy from the process. They gave a great deal of power to these 700-800 party apparatchiks -- who may be idiots, hacks, or Joe Lieberman -- and this time, they may just be asked to exercise that power. They will probably decide the winner.

Maybe that's stupid, but that's how you win the Democratic nomination. posted by Carlton at 10:51 PM