First I got smacked with popular vote vs. electoral college or something. Then I’ve got supreme court judges picking my president for me, then I’ve got electronic voting and something called “chads.”
Now I’ve got Superdelegates fucking things up.
Every fucking election there’s something new I’ve never heard of custom designed to fuck up what I thought was a pretty simple and straightforward process.
Grrr.
And I honestly have no idea what a Superdelegate is. I could google it I suppose, but I’m not sure I care. In four years there’s going to be a quasi-delegate which apparently is suddenly important and will fuck up my election.
If people are voting to determine who their party representatives will choose as presidential candidate, won’t that be predetermined when the people in all the states and territories have voted? Why have the party convention at all, if it’s a just a rubber stamp?
The thing to remember is that the American political process grew, it wasn’t designed.
The first thing to remember is that the people who drafted the Constitution were phenomenally conflicted people: They believed in Democracy, with that capital D, but at the same time, they also mistrusted the masses. If you don’t believe me, consider that franchise was originally restricted to propertied men. And then look at the way that the Senators were elected. And the Electoral College, today.
So, as the political party (I hesitate to call it a system) lens for American politics grew, the original purpose of the conventions was to allow for the party leaders to select the candidate. And for the conventioneers, who were either leaders in their own right, or more often either proteges or placeholders for those leaders, to basically network, for their local issues to see what should or should not be pushed to be a national issue. The working out of a party platform, was just that - where a group of influential delegates would come to the convention to support their individual points, or planks, to work a compromise platform that the party, and its candidates, would support.
Which was a workable process, if not what I’d call an ideal one.
While this was going on, many of the insulations that the framers of the Constitution had established to put government at one remove from the masses were falling by the wayside: the sanction of slavery, the restrictions based on property for the franchise, extending the franchise to women, the direct election of Senators - all were what I’d call part of a Populist thread in American politics.
By the second half of the Twentieth Century, it became noted that a lot of the power brokers at the political conventions were people who were influential without ever having stood for a single popular election, and were often choosing planks, platforms and even candidates that were not Populist. And so the next great Populist reform was to establish Primary elections where the people would be able to choose their planks, platforms and especially candidates - since the candidate they chose would have the plank and platform they wanted, of course.
Now we get towards today, where people are starting to think that maybe those smoke-filled rooms weren’t all bad, after all, and so the Democratic Party decided to have some votes at the convention that weren’t tied to the popular voting results, in an effort to allow for some moderation of the popular choice. (which I want to say, explicitly, isn’t all that much more popular if the primary process drags on for months, so that the first states to vote have a radically different ballot than the latter states…)
In this instance, I believe that the Democratic Party chose to try to have it’s cake (the Populist primaries) and eat it, too (by allowing for the party faithful to vote their conscience at the convention) and it’s going to end up giving them indigestion.
The convention’s purpose and utility, these days is greatly reduced, but just because it’s not as much official power, don’t underestimate the utility of having the party leaders meeting face-to-face, networking, establishing contacts for the next election cycle, or simply trying to look at local issues that may be growing towards national importance. The conventions still serve a useful purpose, or at least I believe they can serve one. Even if the excuse for the convention, choosing the candidate, has been obviated.
On preview: Levdrakon, that’s because the concept of the Superdelegate is a new one, specifically introduced for this election cycle.
The Democratic Party has been using superdelegates for at least 20 years. It was instituted as a reform to prevent corrupt local party bosses or single-issue radicals from controlling the convention.
The official Democratic party term is “unpledged party leader and elected official delegates.”
Geraldine Ferraro explains and tries to justify the use of superdelegates in this NY Times Op-Ed. I don’t agree with her at all, but it has some good background info.
The issue was this: primaries tend to bring out the more radical members of the party (conservatives for Republicans and liberals for Democrats). Moderates just have a history of voting less frequently, yet, in order to get elected, you need the votes of moderates. After the Democrats got burned in 1972 by having the left wing of the party dominate to nominate McGovern, they wanted to do something to put a brake on the more liberal/radical members.
Thus, the superdelegates were formed, the idea being that putting a few professional politicians as part of the process is a good thing. They can focus on things like electability and personality issues that the voters generally do not.
So far, there has been a clear leader going into the convention, so the superdelegates were never an issue. This year, Hillary and Obama are closer than it has been in decades, so the superdelegates are a concern.
The idea that primaries determine the nominee is a fairly new one (caucuses are even newer). Primaries were originally run in a small number of states as sort of a straw poll of the party; most delegates were regular party people beholden to their state boss. This sounds worse than it was, since, in general, the bosses wanted a candidate who had a good chance of being elected. Presidents rarely messed with local politicians, and there were a lot of advantages to being the party in the White House. So the bosses would pick a good, solid candidate, even if he was anti-boss, since winning was more important than the risk they’d go after him.
The system wasn’t all that much worse than the current one. It did produce candidates like Lincoln (whose agents horse traded with the best of them to get the nomination), Tilden, Teddy Roosevelt (as vice president), William Jennings Bryan, Charles Evans Hughes, Herbert Hoover (if the Depression hasn’t messed him up – he certainly was a well-qualified candidate), FDR, Adlai Stevenson, and, as a last gasp, JFK (though primaries were gaining effectiveness, and JFK needed to win them to prove his Catholicism wasn’t going to wreck his candidacy).
Superdelegates were in the news in 1988. The same talking heads were saying they would ‘stop’ Jesse Jackson if he made a serious threat at the nomination.
Faster than a speeding caucus, more powerful than the Texas primary, able to leap from candidate to candidate in a single bound. There, up at the convention!
YOUR sick of this shit?At least you live there.
O.K. the U.S. is the most powerful country in the world so I can see that the election of a new president is relevant even to us poor unfortunates who were unlucky enough to be born foreigners,but a blow by blow tracking of who the fucking candidates might be come the day at some time in the future is somewhat taking the piss.
I’m voting for Obama by the way.
OH NO I forgot that I’m a BRITISH CITIZEN for a moment,I’m not even going to be giving my opinion in in one of the two million polls.
Just get someone elected do you hear me?Now ,this instant!I’ve had enough I cant stands no more!