Election 2008

Those watching CNN these days (and their numbers are growing) are likely to be impressed by the discussion of superdelegates and their role in the Democratic race. CNN pundit Donna Brazile, herself a superdelegate, jokes self-deprecatingly about how she doesn’t “wear a cape.” Now everyone has the imagery. Last evening, as Obama captured the Chesapeake, CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed a 21-year-old superdelegate from Wisconsin, who these days steps into a phone booth (well, not quite), to take calls from Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright and has photo-ops with Michelle and Barack Obama.

You realize, don’t you, that they’ll drop you right after the Denver convention? Cooper asked young Jason Rae, well-spoken but looking more like a paperboy than Superboy. So what? In the meantime, there’s no Kryptonite that can weaken the Superdelegates, whose power seems as unlimited as it is inherently undemocratic. Some of the CNN crowd maintain that Superdelegates would never dare to contradict the popular will; Bill Schneider even speculated that some Superdelegates might become Supercowards and skip the Convention rather than cast a controversial vote.

But the truth is no one knows. No one is quite sure about these 796 Persons of Steel and exactly how many have fallen for one of the candidates. Look how cautious the NYT is this morning on delegate counts:

Obama aides calculate [emphasis added] that he also leads in delegate counts that include so-called superdelegates, the party officers and elected officials who control 20 percent of the total delegates to the Democratic convention…

Many of the Superones are being coy because they know that their power starts to weaken the moment they make their allegiance public. Meantime, John King has a Supermap that calculates that even if Obama sweeps the remainder of the primaries with a 55% majority in each state, ordinary delegates’ votes will not give him the 2,025 votes he needs to win the nomination.

Holy Democracy, Batman! Or, as Orwell would have put it, all delegates are created equal, but some are more equal than others.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.