Mike Booth: The Gringo Chronicles

Faster than a speeding pork barrel, more powerful than executive privilege, able to leap tall ballot boxes in a single bound. There in the sky, is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Superdelegate!

Now that the contest for the Democratic nomination is intensifying we see the term “superdelegate” popping up more and more in the media, but I have yet to see an explanation of how some of the Democratic Convention delegates became “super.” It seems that there are delegates and delegates and that some of them are more equal than others, and not precisely because they eat more spinach.

First stop, the Wikipedia: “’Superdelegate’ is an informal term for some of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention, the quadrennial convention of the United States Democratic Party.” According to the online encyclopedia, the superdelegates are not elected in primary elections nor party caucuses, but are delegates ex-oficio by virtue of being Democratic incumbents or ex office holders. They are what the Democratic Convention website refers to as “unpledged and pledged party leaders and elected official delegates,” whatever that means. We shall refer to them here as “The Team from the Machine.” There are 796 of them, making up roughly 20% of the total number of delegates to the Democratic Convention.

The N.Y. Times remarks that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama “are lavishing attention on a group that might hold the balance of power,” a group that “will in essence serve as tie breakers.” The Times adds, “Known as superdelegates because they are free to cast their votes at the convention as they see fit, they are the object of an intensifying and potentially high-stakes charm offensive by the candidates and their supporters.”

One shudders when contemplating what ungodly black ops that “high-stakes-charm-offensive” euphemism refers to. Never mind, I’d still like to know from what planet Krypton these superdelegates got their superpowers. For that we have to go back to the Wikipedia. It seems that after the 1968 Convention, the Democratic Party varied its delegate selection process in line with the findings of the McGovern-Fraser Commission, making the composition of the convention less subject to control by party leaders and more responsive to the votes cast during the nomination campaign. That is to say, more democratic.

With so many left-wing loose cannon around in those days, some influential Democrats found this concession to direct democracy intolerable, so after the 1980 presidential election they instituted the superdelegate rule, putting the decisive power to swing the Democratic primaries back into the hands of “The Team from the Machine.” They’re not elected, they’re appointed. They’re loyal. To whom? To the Machine.

If that’s the case, then what are the Democratic primaries about? They’re just a distraction, a divertimento, the same old shell game. The upshot is that while Clinton and Obama are running around the country raising hurricanes of political ballyhoo, all of their shouting and arm waving—as well as the votes of the freely-elected delegates—will be rendered useless by the “quality votes” of the superdelegates. So don’t get excited about the ups and downs of the two candidates on the stump. That’s just puppet theater. Ultimately the Democratic Party candidate will be chosen where the real power is lurking: in smoke-filled rooms deep in the belly of the Machine.