{"id":10991,"date":"2008-02-25T15:00:31","date_gmt":"2008-02-25T20:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/02\/25\/10991.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:11","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:11","slug":"superiority-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/02\/25\/superiority-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"Superiority, complex"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger suspects that much of Left Blogovia will be cranky about Geraldine Ferraro’s op-ed in this morning’s Times<\/I>. It’s called Got a Problem? Ask the Super<\/a> and it argues that (a) the superdelegates are trustees, not representatives, and as such should bring their own judgment to bear rather than going along with the result of the primaries, and (2) the superdelegates, in their role as credentials committee, should seat the delegations from Michigan and Florida as if their primaries had been approved by the national party. She brings her experience to bear on the question, as she was on the committee that created the super delegates in 1982, after the 1980 election.
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Her recollection is that the 1980 convention was a disaster, with Sen. Kennedy causing trouble. “When it was all over, members of Congress who were concerned about their re-election walked away from the president and from the party.” I find that both plausible and perplexing. What would superdelegates have done about it? Is she suggesting that they would have voted against the incumbent president? Or is she suggesting that in the name of Party unity they would have prevented Ted Kennedy from proposing platform amendments? Would either of those have prevented Phil Gramm from becoming a Republican?
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Which is not to say that it didn’t seem<\/I> like a good idea in 1982, with the defections and all, to give the Democrats in Congress a sense that they were the Party, now, particularly with the Republican Party having a lock on the Presidency for a generation, as they were claiming. Still. Why, in the name of Party unity, should a superdelegate who thinks that either candidate would be fine, cross up his constituency?
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Ah, but it wouldn’t be crossing up the constituency, argues Ms. Ferraro, because “the delegate totals from primaries and caucuses do not necessarily reflect the will of rank-and-file Democrats.” That’s because of low turnout (the turnout is higher than expected, but still well below a third of registered Democrats) as well as because of the open primaries, where Republicans, independents and other riffraff pervert the course of democratic and Democratic representation. Well, and you know, Gentle Reader, that I prefer my primaries closed, but I don’t see any way to read these combined arguments other than as a total dismissal of the primary and caucus system altogether<\/I>. In which case, let’s bring back John Edwards! Let’s bring back Bill Richardson! Let’s bring back Chris Dodd! The people haven’t spoken!
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A better form of this argument would go like this: currently, we have two very good candidates, and both the polls and the elections have indicated that our party would happily back either. In this circumstance, the superdelegate is free to follow her own whim, because it simply isn’t possible to make a bad choice. The party will be unified, either way. In fact, the rank and file, in its wisdom, has in effect presented the superdelegates with a choice and said whichever you like, it’s OK with us<\/I>. A hundred delegates more for one or the other (the argument goes) merely shows how close the candidates are to each other, rather than being some incontrovertible evidence of real preference. In that circumstance, it’s incumbent on a superdelegate to consider carefully the two candidates in the light of superdelegatory experience and wisdom, and come to an independent conclusion.
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See? Isn’t that easier to swallow? I half believe it, myself.
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Now, to the matter of the contested delegations from Michigan and Florida. Lordy, lordy what a balls-up. It’s utterly preposterous to seat the delegates selected by an unapproved election, where the voters were told in advance that the delegates would not<\/I> be seated, where the candidates did not campaign, and in one case where one candidate wasn’t even on the ballot. It’s also utterly preposterous to not seat a delegation from Michigan and Florida, simply choosing the candidate without letting those states have a say. We could scramble together a new caucus or primary in those states, now that we know it counts, but that would be just as preposterous and a lot more expensive. No, there are no good answers here at all.
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Do you know who got us into this balls-up? I believe it was, hm, let me think, yes, the Democratic National Committee. You know, the superdelegates. The ones whose superior judgment, experience and expertise in politics we should look to in candidate choice. No, nobody expected it to wind up like this, but then, most of us aren’t claiming special powers to “determine what is best for our party and best for the country”. You see, Ms. Ferraro, before your 1982 committee, there was another committee to correct the balls-up of 1968. And there will be another committee in 2010, you betcha. We tend to solve the problem that we see in the rear-view, not the one in the windshield. That’s how people are, and fine, but in the meantime, it would be nice, as events unfold, for the superdelegates to act with some modesty, some decorum, some generosity of spirit. For the sake of party unity.
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And then vote for Sen. Clinton, if you like. Because we really do have two wonderful candidates, and I think any Democrat worthy of the name will support either, with vigor and passion and pride.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger cannot decide if he is a rank or a file.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10991"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18282,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10991\/revisions\/18282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}