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Current mood:  animated
I'm going to break my blogging silence to discuss the issue of the Democratic Presidential primary. It's been interesting and fun to watch the whole process but as it goes further along we seem to be at an impasse. Obama has been raising huge amounts of money, rallying support, and recently rolled to 11 straight victories over Hillary Clinton. And yet with this knowledge apparent to everyone watching the proceedings, voters in Ohio and Texas (two key Democratic states) chose Clinton, and in Ohio they chose her decisively.
This creates quite an interesting situation. If Obama was the clear candidate of choice then he would have delivered his knock-out blow on Tuesday and we would be talking about the general election now. Instead the results showed that not everyone is convinced by his message of hope and there are still two viable candidates in this race.
So now comes the role of the Super-Delegate. I have heard many people espouse the idea that the super-delegates (those party leaders and officials who have the opportunity to delegate their vote for whomever they choose, without any obligation) should vote with the will of the people. In other words, whoever has the most delegates should get the super delegates as well. If the solution was so cut and dry then one would have to ask why even have super delegates in the first place?
The reality is that they serve a crucial role in the process of selecting a candidate. The truth is that the most electable candidate isn't always the one chose by the people. This was the reason for the institution of super delegates in the first place. Democrats of the 60's watched George McGovern get trounced by Richard Nixon because he was too liberal to win in a general election and they watched Jimmy Carter struggle, only to lose 4 years later because he wasn't an electable candidate. At that point the upper echelons of the Democratic Party decided they needed to have greater involvement in the process, thus the creation of super delegates who would not be bound to the vote of the people.
In all honesty super delegates should absolutely not vote simply to reflect the will of the people. That is ludicrous. There's not even a simple way for them to determine what the will of the people is. Do they just all vote for the person with the most delegates? That seems silly and pointless. Do they vote for the person who carried their particular district or state? That's not really fair since no effort is made to make super delegates proportional across the country so, in effect some districts would become super-districts, carrying more weight or power than their population warrants.
What super delegates should do is take their years of wisdom and experience and vote for the person they believe to have the greatest chance to win in a general election. Alone they do not have the power to pick a candidate (despite Obama's allusions to decision being made in smoke-filled back rooms) but what they can do is take two candidates who have fought to a pretty even match and determine who they think has the best chance to win. If that is Obama then choose Obama, if that's Clinton then choose Clinton. But whatever they do, they need to fulfill their crucial role in this primary process.
In the end I doubt whether either is strong enough to win the general election anyway. Either one will face an uphill battle against John McCain, which is interesting in a year that is supposedly dubbed as the time for change. You wouldn't think a 71 year old life-long Washington politician would would have much of a chance in that setting, however I'm afraid many people are just not as much in favor of change when it involves voting for a woman or an African American but that's a topic for a different post.
5:01 PM
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