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Politics as Usual by Jim Baron As a rule, Politics as Usual doesn’t do requests.
As a rule, Politics as Usual doesn’t do requests.
But I had been thinking about wrestling with the issue of superdelegates that seem to be so much in the news these days, because some people are starting to think they might finally matter. So when a Tele-Times caller suggested a column on superdelegates, I thought, why not?
I am not going to delve into the arcane minutia of the Democratic Party’s delegate selection process here for several reasons: 1) It would take far more time than I have to spend on that now; 2) it would take far more space than is available in this column, or in this newspaper, or in all the editions of this newspaper for the next week or two, and 3) everybody who really cares about those details (all three of them) already know what there is to know.
And guess what? You probably do, too. Not all there is to know, but as much as you really need to know.
You just think you don’t know about superdelegates, because the concept seems weird and complex. When you boil it down, it is perfectly understandable. So here goes: primaries and caucuses where people get to vote are all well and good, but as is the case in so much of life, a select portion of the goodies are set aside for the big shots.
That is really all you have to understand to grasp the process. The superdelegates are the big shots — elected officials, party bigwigs, inside gamers. They are going to get their seat at the table no matter what the rabble have to say about it.
You may think that is slightly undemocratic of the Democratic Party. Tough. Them’s the rules. (Republican rules are radically different and, actually, more democratic. They don’t have superdelegates, although national committee members go to the convention unpledged.)
After the debacle of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the one that, in order of importance, spawned a giant riot and nominated Hubert Humphrey, a group of party insurgents led by a guy named George McGovern changed the rules in a way that aced out many of the party honchos and tipped the nomination process toward the primaries and caucuses. After that produced nominees George McGovern and Jimmy Carter, the party bosses reasserted themselves. The mechanism they created to make sure they were able to keep their fingers in the pie was superdelegates.
Now about one-fifth (796) of the 4,049 delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Denver next August will be superdelegates. Rhode Island has 10 superdelegates, sometimes called PLEO (party leaders and elected officials) delegates.
They can vote for any candidate they choose, no matter how their state, or their congressional district, or their city votes in the primary.
So while Rhode Island may be one of the last places in the country where Hillary Clinton can claim to be a favorite (although Darrell West’s last poll says her lead here is dwindling as well) Patrick Kennedy and Patrick Lynch are big Barack Obama backers, and if they want to go to Denver and vote to nominate Obama, there’s nothing to stop them from doing that.
Well, not nothing exactly. Kennedy and Lynch are both elected officials and if they want to remain elected officials (or in term-limited Lynch’s case, want to be elected to another office) they have to be able to explain to their constituents why they voted the way they did (not that all that many constituents are going to care). But nothing besides their own self-interest serves to restrict their discretion. That is the case with all 796 superdelegates.
Say for example the mayor of a medium-sized city who is also a superdelegate and who has already stated a preference for a certain candidate gets miffed when that candidate disinvites him to a rally she is having in his city because she doesn’t want his problem with unionized firefighters to become her problem with unionized firefighters.
In his pique, that superdelegate can put out the word that he is thinking of changing sides, just as his original choice is looking at her chances for nomination circling the bowl nationally. (Now you may have thought that, in that example, I was talking about Providence Mayor David Cicilline and Hillary Clinton, but…O.K., yeah, that’s who I was talking about.) Technically, Cicilline is not a Rhode Island superdelegate, he has that status by virtue of being the head of the National Conference of Democratic Mayors.
So that pretty much explains the phenomenon of superdelegates: once again, big shots get to have their way. Come to think of it, that is as good a definition of politics, (yes, and government, too) as you could ask for.
You may like the idea of superdelegates, you may not. But that is the way the Democratic Party chooses to set up its process for nominating a presidential candidate. If you don’t like it, you can choose to vote for a candidate of another party, or an independent candidate.
And while some of you out there might vote for a Republican (even though this is Rhode Island), you aren’t going to vote for a third-party or independent candidate, so you have no choice but to shut up and accept the superdelegates and the candidate they nominate.
It does beg the question, however, that if when voters go to the polls in Rhode Island and other states to participate in Democratic primaries and caucuses, that is not the last word, if party hacks can come in and change the results, why are the taxpayers at the state and municipal level being forced to pay to put on the primaries?
Already boards of canvassers in cities and towns across the state have collected and verified the signatures on nomination papers and the Secretary of State’s office have certified them. Boards of Canvassers will be at work again on Primary Day, as will the state Board of Elections.
It is bad enough that these public employees are being used and the tax dollars spent on behalf of a private political organization. That in itself should be stopped. But if the primaries are not even going to be the last word, even on how state delegations vote for a nominee, it is an absolute outrage that we are letting ourselves be used by the Democratic Party like this.
It’s too bad that taxpayers and voters don’t have the backbone to put a halt to this nonsense. |
