Those Mysterious Super Delegates

With the Democratic race as close as a flea to a dog, wooing Super Delegates has become the name of the game. The challenge for the Supers is to be able to maintain their neutrality until the convention and avoid the ploys of surrogates who have been assigned to win them over.

Bill Clinton, in a speech at the recent San Jose Democratic Party convention urged attendees to “chill out” and let the election process play out until the last state primary has been decided, but he met privately with the Supers where he encouraged them not to decide prematurely on the nominee and deny voters the chance for their votes to count in the forthcoming primaries.

The Hillary Clinton gang is in an uproar over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s apparent attempt to co-opt the votes of the so-called Super Delegates. Pelosi wants “Supers” to cast their convention votes for the candidate with the most pledged delegates.

The Clintonistas decry Pelosi’s move as an effort to guarantee Barack Obama’s nomination even though that violates the party’s original intent when they created the bloc of Super Delegates. In a letter to Pelosi, Clinton supporters reminded her of having said only ten days ago: “…Super Delegates have to use their own judgment” and have an obligation to make an informed, individual decision about “who they think will be the best president and who they think can win”.

The process for choosing major party national convention delegates may be understood by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Brit Hume of Fox News, but the average voter in rural Wyoming or urban Orange County hasn’t a clue about how the system works. Franklin and Eleanor Democrat, as well as other voters, are overwhelmed by constant references to those mysterious Super Delegates, caucuses, lost delegates from states who held primaries too early, and candidates who “win” a primary but get fewer delegates than the loser.

The media’s current Topic Du Jour is “Super Delegates”, but rank and file Democratic voters are really at sea when asked to explain how these delegates to the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating convention are selected and whether they are pledged to a specific candidate or free to vote their conscience.

Democrats in Florida and Michigan are smarting because they voted in what they thought was a primary but the Democratic National Committee ignored their ballots since they voted too early. The primary in Texas was seemingly won by Clinton but Obama picked up so many votes in Caucuses - yes Texas had both primaries and caucuses - that he could claim victory there too.

Elsewhere, few -- if any -- Democratic voters can tell you how many pledged or unpledged delegates their states have or how they will be parceled out to the various candidates at the convention. Nor do they know who the Super Delegates are or if those delegates are really obligated to vote for winners of the primaries and caucuses.

The idea for Super Delegates originated with party hacks who were out of sorts when lowly voters across the nation in 1972, elected so many delegates pledged to anti-war candidate George McGovern that he won the party’s presidential nomination – then went on to lose, overwhelmingly, to Richard Nixon.

Not wanting that to happen again, Super Delegates were created. In 1984, the Democratic National Committee revised their rules to create a large block of “unpledged party leaders and elected officials”, referred to as PLEO delegates, who would have seats at the National Convention. The theory was that in the event of a close race, they would have sufficient voting strength to assure nomination of the most moderate and electable candidate. Later they became known as “Super Delegates” and technically, they are free to vote as they see fit, unbound by the outcome of their states’ primaries and caucuses.

Of the 2,025 out of 4,048 votes needed to secure the nomination at the convention, those unpledged Super Delegates will make up 1/5 of that number. Their potential role could become that of “Kingmakers” if they throw the nomination to a candidate who had fewer pledged delegates than the front runner.

All had been quiet about Super Delegates until this election turned into a head to head race. Suddenly, they were number one in the news when Pelosi got into the act and publicly argued that “unpledged” Super Delegates should support the candidate coming to the convention with the most pledged delegates.

Perhaps the role of “Super Delegates” will become clear to millions of confused Democratic voters when the party leadership that gave birth to this stratagem stops changing the rules.