Posted by
jarhead on Saturday, March 01, 2008 5:17:06 PM
If you read a little about the superdelegate process you quickly come to understand that the party aparatus is still mired in elitest thinking and has no stomach for what the voting public may want should that want be at odds with the elitist's wants. I won't go into the whole taudry history but the Democratic party, in an effort to break the hold of a few old line political bosses, made an effort to actually open up the process to the folks they say they support and represent. But after a couple of disasterous Presidentional picks the Democratic elite reverted to form and came up with the super delegates. These are the party elite whose job it is, as 40% for the total delegates required to secure a nomination or establish the party platform, to make sure that all those rabble they let into the process don't spoil the party by actually selecting candidates and platforms that represent the voting publics interests.
You need to understand that many of these elitists are not elected so they can not even claim a distant connection to the average democrat in the street; further, while your local delegate may represent 100s or thousands of individuals who voted for a particular candidate, these elitist superdelegates vote entirely on their own interests and their votes is the equal of an elected delegate.
Think of it this way; what if we elected 60 senators to the U.S. Senate but the 40 remaining were picked because of past office service or just picked to suit the desires of party bosses for personal reasons. Those 40 can be folks who lost elections, meaning they were not representative of the peoples interests, picked because they represent certain special interests (and you're worried about lobbyists?) or picked by party leaders in smoky backrooms. Does that sound like representative Democracy? No-it sounds a lot more like a few folks thinking they know what's best for everyone else and designing a system to assure their own continued power and the continuation of their ideas. It's a reprehensible system and really does make it clear how the Democratic Party could be taken over by a handful of extremists.