April 28, 2008

Confessions of a Superdelegate

 

The identity of this superdelegate is being withheld for obvious reasons. We believe he/she expresses the thoughts and feelings of many of his/her colleagues during these difficult days:

 

I’m upset and nervous and I’m not going to take it any more. This is not what I expected when they made me a superdelegate. I thought that being a king/queen-maker would be a lot more fun. It’s become a real drag.

 

I realize I’m uncomfortable about the whole idea of “superdelegates”. It seems un-democratic, at least un-Democratic. Even the name bothers me. It makes me think of Superman and “fighting for truth and justice and the American way” – by beating up on everyone else. Superman must have been a Republican. “Superdelegates” seems like more of a Republican thing.

 

I like the Republican way of doing primaries, with clear winners and losers without unnecessary complications. I’ll bet the folks who designed our system also invented school athletics where they don’t keep score, so no kids feel bad about losing. We have some things to learn from those Republicans.

 

John McCain even asked for an unsavory ad to be withdrawn, one that’s being used by one of our own candidates against the other. (Guess which one.) What have things come to? I guess Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment could also be a lesson from our Republican friends. “Trust but verify” is another, though we never thought of it being necessary for party primaries.

 

We’re supposed to be for new politics versus old politics. I thought that meant trusting the people, following the rules, not allowing raw power politics to divert us from what we feel is right. Something seems wrong with the way this picture is turning out.

 

I hear Hillary Clinton is including Michigan and Florida in her count of the popular vote. I wonder if those guys were in the same conversations when they decided votes from states that didn’t follow the rules wouldn’t count, as dumb as that now seems.

 

I can’t imagine our leaders didn’t anticipate this problem when they made rules that could exclude entire states from the primary process. Neither did the candidates, who apparently went along. People expecting us to use our votes now to fix this mess doesn’t seem right. Such is life in the Big Leagues.

 

Hillary threatens to take the issue to the Convention’s Credentials Committee. I remember an old political boss explaining many years ago, that “In politics, what is ‘right’ is whatever you can get the most votes in the right setting to say is right, no matter what anyone else believes.”

 

Hillary is now making reference to the Lincoln-Douglas debates in her attempts to goad Barack Obama into another encounter. The comparison seems a bit overblown. And if it does have something to it, who does she think is Douglas?

 

We agreed that whoever received the most delegates would get the nomination. Now Hillary is saying that popular vote should be the real criterion. We asked Al Gore about that and he just smiled. But she also says that winning states with more electoral votes should count more. Is there a common thread to all this? This campaign is the best argument yet for a series of regional popular primaries. But that doesn’t help us with our current mess.

 

People keep saying they want to change politics-as-usual, but many keep voting for politics-as-usual. It’s puzzling. I’ve imagined the “new politics” as emphasizing respect for the integrity of process as much as results, straight talk over spin – not having to filter through muck to identify the shred of truth a candidate might be saying. This campaign seems more like telemarketing.

 

I am nervous as hell that, whatever we do, we’ll get blamed for losing this ours-to-lose election. A quarter of each candidate’s supporters say they won’t vote for the other candidate. Many young people and blacks say they won’t vote at all if Obama isn’t the nominee, especially if by some technicality. Now it’s up to us. I don’t like thinking about “ours-to-lose” exactly in this way.

 

James Carville and a few other Hillary supporters are now saying that Indiana will be the “tie-breaker”, usually adding he agrees with Obama on this. It’s a relief to hear anything that seems like a possible way out. But then I remember that to have a tie-breaker you first have to have a tie. That gets me feeling concerned again.

 

People talk about the superdelegates as if we were an exclusive private club, instead of the motley group of politicians we are. We are supposed to be above it all. But how can we be above it all when most of us have to run for office again? If we’re not careful, we could end up being Bill Richardson. The next time he runs for anything, Hillary’s leftover money will surely go to his opponent.

 

If we are really interested in using our power to protect the party’s interests, we should have established some guidelines around negative campaigning and other bad behavior and made clear we would sanction any candidate that violated our guidelines, where it really counts, with our votes. But we didn’t.

 

Meantime, I keep hoping that the voters – or anyone – will get us off the hook, before the rest of us really have to do something to fix this mess.