To win the honors of being the Democrat on the ballot for President this November, either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama must win a majority of 4049 delegates. So, to put it another way, the first one to get to 2025 gets to claim the Gold Medal for Dems. Much has been made about how Senator Obama has been exceeding expectations, virtually in a neck-and-neck tie with Hillary at this point in the nomination contest. In fact three more states will hold their primaries today, and some say that Obama will out-delegate Clinton.
But the real question is this — are all of the primaries and caucuses being held around America by Democrats just for show? Are they just beauty contests? Is it the case that the Democratic Party may be totally misnamed — because as people are just now starting to understand, there may not be much democratic (small d) input into their nominating process.
Why is this?
The complex and arcane rules of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) provide that of the 2025 delegates to their convention this summer, 796 of them are not chosen by rank and file Dems (whether by primary or caucus). Rather, this group of "Superdelegates" is made up of Governors, Members of Congress, Party Officials, and other insiders. Most significantly is that none of this group of 796 are in any way "bound" to vote for a candidate that wins the primary or caucus in the state in which they live.
To put the influence of these 796 Superdelegates into even more context — if you need 2025 votes to win the prize, if you can be the candidate to lock-down these insiders en masse, then you are nearly 40% of the way to the nomination before one ballot is cast in a polling place or convention.
If you take this bizarre process, and juxtapose it onto the dynamics of this year’s Dem primary, and it becomes very obvious who has the BIG leg up. Hillary Clinton has been running for President for years. Her husband spent the better part of twelve years either running for President, or occupying the White House. Hmmm, I wonder if all of the connections you build up being arguable the most elite Democrat couple in America would help you with Superdelegates? You bet it would!
So it is entirely possible that Senator Barack Obama, who is most definitely waging a grassroots "outside" campaign for his party’s nomination, may actually be able to pull off a delegate-count win going into the DNC’s convention. But in today’s "d"emocrat Party, if you’re the outsider, you are starting at an extreme disadvantage.
Holding up the proverbial mirror, and acknowledging that the GOP has its own "Superdelegates" — having given automatic seats to all of the members of the Republican National Committee. But this is only three delegates per state, and taken as a whole are a significantly smaller percentage of the total number of delegates. For California, the numbers are like this: Dems have 441 delegates of which 71 are unbound "Superdelegates" and reps have 173 delegates of which three are unbound.
In closing, I believe strongly in the right of political parties to choose their own process for nominating their candidates. No one else has any right or standing to dictate to these private entities how they choose to do this. That having been said, I think that both parties need to reform their "Superdelegate" systems, at the very least requiring those party leaders (who probably deserve to be delegates at the convention) to be bound to the winner of the primary or caucus in their home state.
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