So what the fuck ARE superdelegates anyway?

I noticed that in all the hullabaloo about the "Super Tuesday" and the importance of superdelegates, no one on TV or the radio explained just who or what the fuck are they. Going with the common sense assumption that almost everything you look at in detail in the Yoo Ess of Ey is fucked up - the more you scratch the surface, the more absurd things become.

That theory never fails.

So, to wit: about the super dooper candidates.

Officially, a superdelegate is "An elected official or political party leader who attends a presidential nominating convention and who may or may not have made a commitment to vote for a candidate."

OK, in English please...
The u-s-history.com explains it thusly:
"Since the 1980s, the Democratic Party has included a number of “superdelegates” as part of its presidential nominating process. These delegates participate in the national convention, but are not selected by primary or caucus.

In 2004, there are 715 superdelegates, including Democrats from the following constituencies:

* Members of the Democratic National Committee
* Members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives
* Sitting state governors
* Mayor of Washington, D.C.
* “Distinguished party leaders” that include former presidents, vice-presidents and chairmen of the national committee.

The party explains that these delegates are needed to retain faithfulness to Democratic ideals. Critics, however, charge that the superdelegates are designed to block insurgent movements that would reduce the influence of party professionals."

Ah ok. So another word for superdelegates is cronies. Democratic Party insiders. These people do not have to vote the way the citizens in their home state vote.

In fact, their vote is independent of the Democratic Party's voters. They can vote (or not) for whomever they personally like. On a whim. And their vote counts. Even when one Democratic superdelegate endorsed bush jr in 2004 - probably by mistake. This would be funny if it wasn't happening in my country, which dares to call itself democratic...

CNN.com Special Notes: "There are currently 4,049 total delegates to the Democratic National Convention, including 3,253 pledged delegates and 796 superdelegates. The total number of delegate votes needed to win the nomination is 2,025"

So Hillary or Obama needs 2,025 delegates to win. The superdelegates are roughly 39% of this "magic number" of delegates that are needed to win.

Think about it. Almost 40% of delegate votes that make up the 2,025 needed for Hillary or Obama to win are cronies. Unaccountable to the American voter. Can vote for bush, hitler or my grandma for president if the whim strikes them.

These are people who are party insiders, who in nominating a Democratic Party nominee for president are not beholden in their delegate vote to anybody or anything... except their own personal whimsy.

But of course there is more to it than that. If you apply the twin dangerous weapons logic and common sense to this issue, you will (hopefully) see that the superdelegates are incredibly vulnerable to political pressure from their party.

Simply put, they may vote for a candidate such as Hillary because they are afraid that if they do not, the Democratic Leadership Conference (DLC) may not support them anymore in their reelection campaigns, or may try to displace them with someone more malleable.


This leads to a total balls up fucked up absurdity such as Howard Dean taking an early lead in delegates before even the first primaries were held in 2004. So at that point Howard Dean was the leading presidential contender to become a Democratic Party nominee... before any voting took place. To me this is insane - to you, as an American born in this country, you are probably used to common day absurdity like that... who knows...

A Daily Kos diarist:

Even though Obama has won more delegates from the votes of the people of this country, Clinton is in the lead by 72 delegates. Why? Because the primary process allows "superdelegates", elected officeholders and party officials, to have their votes recorded. Why is this fair? Talk about power in the hands of the few. Clinton received 87 more superdelegate votes than Obama, probably from Washington insiders who she and Bill have been in bed with for the past 16 years. I'm mad that my vote today is being upstaged by the votes of the powerful. Let's let the media and the country know that we are pissed off about this.

This makes me upset because it has a tangible effect on the way people will vote today. When people see that Hilary has such a delegate lead, they think she is more "electable" and vote for her.

Another Only in America bullshit that very few really know about. Behind every story you read about America, it seems to me that when you scratch the surface, you hit some kind of an absurdity...


And don't think that the Republican Party does not have its own version of this.
A good blog post on both parties "whimsy delegates"is here, in minnesotamonitor.com:

"The best explanation I've seen for superdelegates came from The Tahlequah Daily Press in Oklahoma last week. "The essential purpose of superdelegates is to maintain some control of the nominating process by establishment party elites"

This is a democracy?

No - this is corruption of democracy.