Last Friday, Chris Bowers wrote a stern post in which he promised to leave the Democratic Party if the superdelegates did not vote in accordance with the results of the pledged delegates. In a similar vein, Miles Mogulescu at the Huffington Post issued a call to build a "Grassroots Movement to Prevent the Democratic Presidential Nominee From Being Selected by Unelected Super Delegates," which would be "analogous to the Supreme Court giving the Presidency to George W. Bush." Today I discovered Obamaiswinning.com, which posits that the "real" magic number is 1627, the number of pledged delegates that would give Obama 51% of the vote, and hence the nomination, despite being "dedicated to the idea that voters -- not political insiders -- should choose the Democratic presidential nominee." (shouldn't it be "thewinneriswinning.com" then?) And finally, Christopher Beam at Slate's Trailhead blog denounces both the Obama and Clinton campaigns' "delegate philosophies" as cynical, describing them as "conveniently ... align[ed] with their political needs."
Not surprisingly, all this furor over the status and role of superdelegates didn't come about until a flaw in the system of allocating pledged delegates was discovered. After all, the source of these problems isn't the existence of superdelegates, but rather the uneven set of rules that states have adopted to allocate their primary votes (open vs. closed primaries, caucusing, proportional allotment, etc.). Yet the tenor and argument of Bowers, Moulescu, Beam, et al suggest that strictly democratic majority rule is supreme and is being usurped by unelected and unaccountable party insiders. In fact, almost half of superdelegates were democratically elected to their respective offices.
It might be true, as Beam argues, that Obama's preference for superdelegates rubber-stamping pledged delegates, and Clinton's preference for superdelegates making their own decisions, mesh well with their electoral needs, but those are post-hoc justifications, hardly a "philosophy" of delegates, born of necessity because of the unique nomination situation that has developed.
The primary system was reformed in 1972 to be more democratic, but little has changed in the past 36 years. And despite the quadrennial griping about Iowa and New Hampshire's un-representativeness, the impetus for change this year came from the states themselves, who moved themselves up in the primary calendar, sometimes at great risk (e.g. Florida and Michigan), in order to have a greater say in the nomination process. But none of that is in question here. Instead an entirely new national standard has been introduced -- majority rule -- and while I am sympathetic, the rules are the rules, and any calls to change them should have happened long ago, or should be dealt with in future elections.
--Mori Dinauer
