I've just caught up with the op-ed by Democratic strategist Tad Devine published in last Sunday's New York Times. In that op-ed, Devine either makes some of the stupidest commentary on the intended purpose of superdelegates, or he is intentionally misrepresenting that purpose.
Devine begins by reviewing the 1984 campaign, noting in breathless prose that after it became clear that Mondale would fall short of achieving the support of a majority of delegates before the convention, "[t]he superdelegates did the work they were created to do: they provided the margin of victory to the candidate who had won the most support from primary and caucus voters." That is utter nonsense. The superdelegates were not created so that they could provide victory to the candidate who had won the most support from primary and caucus voters. If that were the intent, there was no need for superdelegates: simply rewrite the rules so that winning the nomination required only a plurality and not a majority of the pledged delegates from the primaries. No, the whole point of the superdelegates was to retain enough control in the hands of party insiders so that in certain circumstances they could decide the nomination for a candidate who had not won the most support from primary and caucus voters.
While Devine is correct that when the pledged delegates are closely divided, the superdelegates could, by voting as a bloc for the narrow leader, provide a sense that it really wasn't that close, that the party really isn't that divided, that is just a minor side benefit compared with the major intent behind the creation of the superdelegates. What the superdelegates were really intended to do was to swing the nomination to a leadership-approved candidate if, by the time of the convention, many in the party were wringing their hands and wailing, "My God! What have the voters done?" That could be the case if a major scandal involving the leading candidate broke late in the primary campaign, or if the leading candidate died, or something equally extreme and unforeseen occurred.
Devine is correct that superdelegates swinging the nomination earlier in the primary campaign by pledging to support a particular candidate is a very bad idea. If such superdelegate pledges were binding, it would be an idea so bad as to make the whole concept of superdelegates fatally flawed. As it is, early efforts to influence the outcome of the nomination through commitments from superdelegates may not be an idea obviously bad enough to convince the party leadership to give up on their whole concept of superdelegates.
In any event, we don't need to pretend that superdelegates were only ever intended to provide the margin of victory to the candidate who had won the most support from primary and caucus voters. They were not. They were intended, in certain rare and unforeseen circumstances at the end of the primary campaign, to swing the nomination to someone who otherwise would not have received the nomination. The current debate should be over the question of whether a close nomination contest in and of itself qualifies as such a rare and unforeseen circumstance. To my mind, a close nomination clearly does not qualify, and the superdelegates, having no intended role to play, should essentially disappear by showing tremendous deference to the decision of the voters -- even if that is not what the superdelegates were created to do.
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