Back-Room Choices
By MATT BAI
Published: February 3, 2008
This Tuesday was designed to be the day when it all gets decided for Democrats and Republicans, the moment when more than 20 states weigh in at once on the chaotic presidential campaigns. In the Democratic field, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are each hoping to pile up a decisive number of delegates and end in one night what has been a protracted and increasingly unkind competition. If the Democratic voters defy the designs of the party, though, and neither candidate can achieve a clear verdict, the battle will then enter a rare and little-understood phase: the scramble for superdelegates. These are the roughly 800 Democratic Party insiders — elected officials, state chairmen, national committee members — who will make up about a fifth of the total delegate count at the convention and who can vote for any candidate they want, regardless of what the voters in primaries and caucuses have said. Superdelegates were invented by the Democrats after the 1980 election in the expectation that in any future close nomination race, they would line up behind the establishment candidate and head off the possibility of a ruinous floor fight at the convention.
I recently got a short history lesson about this from Gary Hart, who pointed out what he called “eerie parallels” between his near-upset of Walter Mondale in 1984 and Obama’s campaign against Clinton. Not least among them was that Clinton had actually gone back and unearthed Mondale’s signature line: “Where’s the beef?” (It came from a Wendy’s commercial that was all the rage at the time, but it’s doubtful that anyone under 30 had any idea what she was talking about.) Hart reminded me that by beating Mondale in the California primary, just weeks before the convention, he denied the former vice president the delegates he needed for the nomination. Had it not been for the existence of the superdelegates, who lined up behind Mondale, Hart could actually have swiped the nomination.
“Lee and I called every one of the superdelegates personally,” Hart recalled, referring to his wife. “She talked to a woman in Kentucky who said: ‘I want to vote for your husband, but my husband works for the state highway department. And I was told that if I didn’t vote for Mondale, he would lose his job.’ It was hardball at that point.”
If a similar drama unfolds this year, though, the outcome might not be the foregone conclusion that it was then. All of American society, including our politics, has changed in the last 24 years, with the continued decline of centralized institutions. Blind loyalty to organizations has been replaced by a kind of skeptical free agency. If you needed an insurance policy in 1984, you probably called the agent who had been with your family for years; now, as with so much else, you go online and find the lowest price in the time it would take to file your nails. As Obama found out in Nevada, where he won the endorsement of the Culinary Workers Union but lost a lot of its members’ votes, even union workers, once considered a monolithic bloc, no longer blindly follow their leaders’ dictates, preferring instead to choose for themselves.
In this new world, who is to say that the party’s superdelegates would still vote as the reliable instruments of the Democratic establishment? And even if they did, who is to say that other Democrats would tolerate a nomination brokered by a bunch of insiders? In the blog age, such events would likely turn the party upside down.
Entire article
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/magazine/03wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
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