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Personally, I think the superdelegate system ought to be scrapped, or at least seriously curtailed to sitting governors and ex-presidents. The very spirit of it stands in opposition to the movement to incorporate actual voters into the nomination process. And our own New Hampshire presidential primary is a proud historical monument to that movement.
But we've got to play with the game board we've been handed. Right, Florida and Michigan?
There is no longer any doubt as to who our presidential nominee is. Therefore, it is imperative to help Senator Clinton exit the race gracefully on June 3rd and help retire her campaign debt. Every day after June 3rd that we don't have a nominee helps John McCain, John Sununu, and the challengers to Carol Shea-Porter and Paul Hodes.
Superdelegates Governor Lynch and Chairman Buckley: this particular moment stands as a most useful opportunity for you to commit to a candidate. The same goes for remaining pledged Edwards delegate Representative Sharon Nordgren.
I am not urging you to commit to either candidate. I am urging you to commit, and as soon as possible. The fewer question marks out there, the greater the opportunity for our party to come together and put a stop to the eight years of unmitigated disaster that the modern Republican party has given us.
Americans are dying in a war that didn't have to be. No one can afford gas, and we have done next to nothing to get off of oil. Our national debt is bottomless. People are losing their homes to pay for health care.
Races are fun, but we've got to get to work.
Update: Bill says I'm a bully. Pretty rich coming from a campaign that spent a month or so using their (at the time) superdelegate lead as their chief talking point:
Clinton also spoke against bullying superdelegates to make up their minds, saying, "I cant believe it. It is just frantic the way they are trying to push and pressure and bully all these superdelegates to come out. 'Oh, this is so terrible: The people they want her. Oh, this is so terrible: She is winning the general election, and he is not. Oh my goodness, we have to cover this up.'"
On the heels of neutral Nancy Pelosi's statement last week warning against superdelegates contravening the totals of elected delegates, comes more recent words from strong Clinton backers Charlie Rangel and Chuck Schumer.
Rangel:
"It's the people [who are] going to govern who selects our next candidate and not superdelegates," Rangel said last night at a dinner for the New York State Association of Black and Puerto Rican Legislators conference in Albany.
"The people's will is what's going to prevail at the convention and not people who decide what the people's will is," he added.
and Schumer:
"I don't think either candidate wants - or can even get away with - forcing their will down the throat of the other," Schumer told host Tim Russert. "At the end of the day, on June 7, for the sake of party unity, [Democratic National Committee chairman] Howard Dean and the two candidates will have to get together if neither candidate has 2,025 ... and come up with a strategy. Each candidate will have to have buy into that strategy."
...Schumer urged both sides to hammer out a pre-convention deal - and said the approximately 400 unpledged superdelegates should withhold endorsements until a clear winner has emerged.
Harold Ickes notwithstanding, I wonder if we're coming to some collective closure on this potentially party-rending possibility. A like-minded word or two of the same from a high-profile Obama superdelegate would be good too (though this is the posiition of the Obama campaign).
Update: Ask and ye shall receive (thanks Jack). High profile Obama superdelegate Sen. Durbin:
The superdelegates should not be in a position to trump the elected delegates in Denver
Another Update: Someone kindly make them stop saying things that turn people off:
"Superdelegates are not second-class delegates," says Joel Ferguson, who will be a superdelegate if Michigan is seated. "The real second-class delegates are the delegates that are picked in red-state caucuses that are never going to vote Democratic."
As to the merits of that argument, I counter with this very interesting WSJ article sizing up how an Obama-McCain race could change the southern states electoral math.
Add Harold Ickes to the growing list of senior Cliton campaign officials who are doing everything they can kill my enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton.
Ickes, claims that "automatic delegates" (as he puts it in his attempt to spin the issue into confusion) will decide the election - no matter what happens with those pesky small states and those peskier wine and brie eating caucus-goers.
That's not a new argument. Camp Clinton has been building that narrative ever since it became clear to them that they could lose on elected delegates. It's become so pervasive that even neutral Nancy Pelosi smacked it down publicly:
``It's not just following the returns; it's also having a respect for what has been said by the people,'' Pelosi said. It would be ``a problem for the party if the verdict would be something different than the public has decided,'' she said.
What is new is Automatic Ickes' attempt to bolster that argument, and it's odious (my emphasis):
"They are closely in touch with the issues and ideas of the jurisdiction they represent and they are as much or more in touch than delegates won or recruited by presidential campaigns," Ickes said.
Ickes has taken the concept of public servants representing a constituency and transformed it into superdelegates (some of which are public servants, some not) representing the electorate.
That's radical.
(Title and a bit of wording changed because for some reason I made Ickes a super too - I don't actually know if he is one or not.)
So the question we're faced with after whatever happens this year is what to do with the Superdelegate system. I'm sure many of you have your own ideas, but here's a compromise I've been thinking of (obviously, to implement for next time; I have no desire to make this year more complicated). What if we reduced the requirement to be nominated to a majority of the pledged delegates, and then introduce the superdelegates to the equation if nobody gets to that threshold? It seems an unnecessary barrier that in order to get a majority of the delegates pledged, one has to get considerably more than a majority of pledged delegates. And of course, this would save the Party the fractions caused by a Superdelegate-chosen nominee in most cases, and satisfy the many Superdelegates who don't want that role.
