Ah, to be a superdelegate. What to do?
From the Wall Street Journal today:
SuperDelegates Wait and See
More than the average voter, the 795 superdelegates -- Democratic governors, House and Senate members and party officers nationwide -- are sensitive to calculations about a nominee's electability. Their own elections, and those of their party brethren down the ballot, could ride on the coattails of the presidential standard-bearer. Several hundred of these delegates remain uncommitted.
But most would prefer Sen. Obama to Sen. Clinton, Democrats widely agree. He has attracted record numbers of new voters -- especially younger ones, African-Americans and independents. Sen. Clinton, they fear, would lose many of those voters and, worse, drive more Republicans to the polls just to vote against her.
"Superdelegates tend to blow with the wind, and we don't know which way the wind is blowing," says Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, an Obama supporter. "But superdelegates know two things," he added, "only one candidate in modern times," Sen. Obama, has so energized the younger generation as well as built so large a donor base.
Yesterday, in an opinion piece in the New York Times, Gov. Bredesen floated a proposal for the superdelegates to meet in June, after the final nominating contest, to hear from both candidates and commit to one then. Otherwise, he argues, their battle will rage through the summer to the nationally televised convention, and leave the fractured party just two months to unite before November. He says the candidate who looked to have fewer delegates -- combining superdelegates and delegates won in the primaries and caucuses -- would come under pressure to step aside.
And the New York Times this past Sunday:
Lacking a clear route to the selection of a Democratic presidential nominee, the party’s uncommitted superdelegates say they are growing increasingly concerned about the risks of a prolonged fight between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, and perplexed about how to resolve the conflict.
Interviews with dozens of undecided superdelegates — the elected officials and party leaders who could hold the balance of power for the nomination — found them uncertain about who, if anyone, would step in to fill a leadership vacuum and help guide the contest to a conclusion that would not weaken the Democratic ticket in the general election...
Over all, the interviews with these influential Democrats presents a portrait of a particularly exclusive political community in flux, looking for an exit strategy and hoping they will be relieved of making an excruciating decision that could lose them friends and supporters at home.
Sensitive to calculations. Blow with the wind. Fractured party. Perplexed. Uncertain. Leadership vaccuum. Looking for an exit strategy. Hoping they will be relieved of making an excruciating decision that could lose them votes. Where have we heard all of this before?
We could attribute this sort of language to the unique journalistic stylings of one Adam Nagourney, or to the unfriendly musings of the nation's leading Republican, Murdoch-owned royalist newspaper. Or we could recognize that there's a disturbing pattern here.
It is a cliche by now (though inaccurate) that the Chinese symbol for "crisis" is a combination of the words "danger" and "opportunity." For much of the Democratic establishment, however, it seems that any crisis means only "danger", and that the opportunity for decisive and powerful action is usually too terrifying for them to contemplate. When the going gets tough, it seems, the Party Elders are to be found sucking their collective thumbs and cowering in the corner with the look of a deer about to collide with a Mack truck.
Consider recent history in the Democratic Party. In the wake of the horrific losses in the 1994 midterm elections, the reaction of the elders in the Party of FDR and JFK--including and especially those in the White House--was not to right the ship, re-energize the base and regain control of the corruption that had in part led to the defeat. It was instead to tuck their tails between their legs, to tack even farther right than their dominant DLC advisors had previously done, abandon all notions of universal healthcare, and get on board with the major legislative initatives of welfare reform, the Defense of Marriage Act and the V-Chip.
Consider also the response of the Democratic Party head honchos in response to to the unchallenged rise of right-wing hate radio represented such paragons of amoral idiocy as Rush "Sex Tourist" Limbaugh, Sean "Quarterback" Hannity, Bill "Falafel" O'Reilly, and Glenn "My Religion > Yours" Beck. Oh, that's right--there was no response; perhaps they were too "perplexed" and "uncertain" to act. The same, by the way, can be said of our dear leaders' response to the rise of the Faux News Nutwork which to this day still dominates the cable news airwaves in spite of Keith Olbermann's brave insurgency.
Or remember, if you will, November of the year 2000. As the Brooks Brothers rioters staged their chubby-faced protest of unrighteous anger at the process of democratic elections in America, the Democratic establishment was too "sensitive to calculations" to mount the sort of decisive, rapid response that could have sent a Nobel Peace Prize and Oscar-by-association winner to the White House, and delivered us from the unequivocal disaster that has been the last 8 years of Bush rule.
Or reminisce for a moment on the lead-up to the Iraq War, where such fine Democratic leaders as Hillary Clinton and John Edwards "blew with the wind" in a state of nervous shock as they voted to give George W. Bush the unbridled authority to piss away $3 trillion dollars and thousands of brave American soldiers' lives on a devastating invasion and occupation of a country that they fully well knew was based on murderous deceit, oil economics, and the sheer audacity of imperial intimidation.
Think on the dithering confusion and saturnine silence that greeted the baseless yet history-changing Swiftboat allegations against John Kerry in 2004, and thank your Democratic Party elders for the collective wisdom they displayed in the lack of immediate response.
Consider the muteness in deed if not in words of our Congressional leadership on the subjects of ending the funding for the Occupation of Iraq, or for inherent contempt for Bush Administration lackeys, or (God forbid) impeachment for any wide number of high crimes and misdemeanors.
The same people who gave you this cornucopia of cowardice are sitting on the sidelines today, too terrified to make a move. Always keeping the negative in mind, they fret about the consequences of moving en masse to end a nomination contest that is clearly over, if only they allow it to be. Ever doubting themselves and their own political careers, they squirm uncomfortably at the thought of alienating this or that segment of their supporters. Still the worrywarts, they sit back petrified, waiting for someone else to ride to the rescue with a plan for intervention--an intervention that will no sooner come today than it did at any previous crisis point in the past.
Thankfully, they still have the power to change that tune. Every day presents an opportunity for the remaining superdelegates to do the right thing and end this gruesome process before it does any more damage.
The remaining states and territories will still vote. Clinton can still remain in the race. The ground games already afoot in each area can still do their work to pave our road to the general election. There will still be time before the convention to flip back to Clinton should some new devastating piece of news emerge about Obama.
But the time has come at long last when the Party Elders find that courage that has been so lacking in the past and finally do right for a change by declaring, once and for all, that this contest is all over but for the few votes that remain.
By allowing Obama to finally attack John McBush unhampered by the quixotic campaign of those who would kneecap the party to keep their own personal ambitions alive, the mandarins of the Party still have a chance to make some small amends for the fecklessness that has been the hallmark of the last 25 years of Democratic politics. The only question remains whether they will, at long last, take a stand and rediscover the courage they have long been lacking.