Clinton's super delegate problem

Wondering why Clinton has attracted so relatively few super delegates to her campaign despite being a Clinton, Chuck Todd muses:

One reason this has been brushed under the rug? Media-types don't realize the problems many rank-and-file Democratic activists have with the Clinton family.

Simply take a look at Bill Clinton's record from '92 to '00 and you’ll understand why they're having a harder time corralling party activists and elected officials to their side.

Remember, when his name was on the ballot ('92 and '96) the Democratic party lost Senate seats both times. Never mind the beating the party took in '94; a walloping often blamed on both Bill and Hillary.

Even in '98, which was, perhaps, the most successful Congressional election of the Clinton era, the party netted zero Senate seats and gained less than a handful of House seats.

It's not exactly something to brag about.

It's not. Todd is amongst the smartest analysts of the presidential campaign, but I'm wondering at the surprise. I wrote about this on the front page of the Washington Post's Outlook section back in May 2006.

Democrats haven't won more than 50 percent of the vote in a presidential election since 1976. Heck, we haven't won more than 50.1 percent since 1964. And complicit in that failure was the only Democrat to occupy the White House since 1980: Bill Clinton.

Despite all his successes -- and eight years of peace and prosperity is nothing to sneeze at -- he never broke the 50-percent mark in his two elections. Regardless of the president's personal popularity, Democrats held fewer congressional seats at the end of his presidency than before it. The Democratic Party atrophied during his two terms, partly because of his fealty to his "third way" of politics, which neglected key parts of the progressive movement and reserved its outreach efforts for corporate and moneyed interests.

While Republicans spent the past four decades building a vast network of small-dollar donors to fund their operations, Democrats tossed aside their base and fed off million-dollar-plus donations. The disconnect was stark, and ultimately destructive. Clinton's third way failed miserably. It killed off the Jesse Jackson wing of the Democratic Party and, despite its undivided control of the party apparatus, delivered nothing. Nothing, that is, except the loss of Congress, the perpetuation of the muddled Democratic "message," a demoralized and moribund party base, and electoral defeats in 2000, 2002 and 2004.

But that's not the entirety of Clinton's super delegate problem. Sure, there are veterans of the 90s who watched the Clintons neglect their party. But there's also the new generation of super delegates who are champions of the 50-state strategy that Clinton and her campaign have so mercilessly mocked in deed this year. There are Red state Democrats who know they are important, and that there are those of us all around the country willing and eager to lend a helping hand to turn our entire nation Blue, whether it take one election cycle or 20. There are super delegates who understand their reelection battles or those of their fellow challengers to Republican seats will be easier with Obama at the top.

It is yet another structural disadvantage for a Clinton campaign that has managed to alienate more than inspire this campaign season.

Now it's up to those super delegates to decide whether we, as a party and as a nation, are better off letting this thing drag on into the convention, or whether they step up as leaders and ratify the inevitable outcome before more damage is done.