Let's step back from the Democratic presidential primary and have a think about superdelegates, why the Democrats have them and what good they are (or aren't). Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean gave a lot of people a jolt when he said late in April, "I think the race is going to come down to the perception in the last six or eight races of who the best opponent for McCain will be. I do not think in the long run it will come down to the popular vote or anything else [our italics]."
It's appalling how few things come down to the popular vote these days; the good ship American Democracy seems to spring a new leak every week. How did the Democratic Party, the self-described party of the people, get to be a party in which other people than the voters became the deciders?
The superdelegate system came in in 1980, when Democratic Party bosses had become fed up with nonapparatchiks like Jimmy Carter and Eugene McCarthy challenging those favored by party regulars. In 1984 this system ensured that Walter Mondale won the nomination over Gary Hart, though Hart had won more state primaries and caucuses. A political scientist, Rhodes Cook, quoted in The Nation, called the superdelegate system a "firewall to blunt any party outsider that built up a head of steam in the primaries."
The superdelegate system as it has played out historically not only has the potential to subvert the popular vote; it has not shown itself especially adept at measuring what it puts forward as the all-important factor, a candidate's "electability." Apart from the question of whether anything shows more electability than a demonstrated capacity to get votes, the track record of the superdelegates and their predecessors hardly suggests that they are geniuses at assessing this quality. The people who later brought in the superdelegate system ran Hubert Humphrey, who did not win. The superdelegates of 1984 ran Mondale, who did not win. It's not as if superdelegates have put in place a steady succession of winners.
Dean's statement points up an issue that could be either very costly or very cleansing for the Democrats. The decision they make over how much to allow the weight of this race to fall on the superdelegates is crucial not just to this contest, but to the confidence of Democratic voters and, later, other voters who in November will have the final word about electability.
