By Robert Schlesinger
The superdelegates are coming! The superdelegates are coming!
The superdelegate narrative goes something like this: While Barack Obama has opened a lead in pledged delegates, Hillary Clinton has kept the race close — and may yet pull back ahead — on the strength of superdelegates, an elite unit of crack supporters fanatically loyal to The Clintons. A veritable Republican Democratic Guard.
Or … not. Rather than being a sinister Clinton cadre, the superdelegates are politicians with agendas of their own and a strong instinct for self-preservation. Are they about to — as the saying goes — subvert the will of democracy (or Democracy)? Not bloody likely.
Here’s how the superdelegate narrative developed: Obama won early victories, but Clinton still led in delegates because of early, strong support from superdelegates. This became transmuddlefied into a notion that because superdelegates are veteran pols who know/are obliged to/fondly remembe/have ties to The Clintons. And it’s a story line with legs, because it holds out the notion of smoke-filled rooms, a rowdy, brokered convention and democracy (or Democracy) subverted. Unfortunately it doesn’t pass the logic test.
Take today’s front page NYT piece — headlined, “Old Clinton Ties and Voters’ Sway Tug at Delegates” — which breaks down how many pledged and superdelegates each candidate has. According to the Times, of 300 remaining unaffiliated superdelegate about 30 “have a long and often personal history with the Clinton family” and 100 are from states that Obama has won. The advantage here goes to Obama. He also has some financial advantages, as I discuss over at The Huffington Post.
But there are larger issues:
The candidates’ targets — an elite electorate — are in flux. The superdelegates face a set of political crosscurrents, especially since Clinton has surrendered her early status as her party’s clear front-runner, and with it the pressure she could exert on her party’s leaders to get on board early with her. And they are in an unaccustomed position because neither Clinton nor Obama is expected to win the 2,025 delegates needed to claim the nomination before the end of the voting season, so they will need the support of superdelegates to get over the top.
So the argument is — what? — that when all the counting is done if Obama holds a delegate lead there’s a realistic possibility that Clinton has sleeper agent superdelegates that, not having gotten on the Hillary train when it was advertised as being unstoppable, will suddenly jump on board, causing cries of electoral theft and turmoil at the convention in Denver? Seriously?
The only way the superdelegates coalesce around Hillary Clinton is if Barack Obama has some sort of meltdown before crossing the 2,025-delegate threshold. So barring Obama doing lines on “Meet the Press” or bursting into tears the next time Mrs. Clinton declares words “cheap,” there’s no reason to believe the superdelegates will save her bacon.
Hillary supporters will argue superdelegates should push her over the top if she receives the most votes (as opposed to delegates), but it’s a specious argument: How are the caucus votes counted in this tally? And: How to account for states in which one or the other candidate barely contested the race and so the winner was able to run up big margins of victory.
