A non-paranoid's guide to superdelegates

Rather than an anti-Obama cabal, these Democratic insiders are the ultimate tiebreakers.

By Walter Shapiro

Read more: Democratic Party, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Politics, News, Walter Shapiro, John Edwards, Barack Obama, 2008 election

Feb. 25, 2008 | In political mythology, the Democratic Party's 796 "superdelegates" are often portrayed these days as strange visitors from another planet (one heavily populated with cigar-smoking political bosses) who came to earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal voters. But instead of fighting for truth, justice and the American Way, these automatic superdelegates are angrily depicted as out to change the course of history by defying the will of the people and handing an undeserved nomination to Hillary Clinton.

These fears, emanating from passionate supporters of Barack Obama, are comically exaggerated. Rather than a cabal, the superdelegates (who will cast slightly fewer than 20 percent of the votes at the Democratic National Convention in Denver in late August) are mostly practicing and pragmatic politicians worried about getting out of step with their own constituents. (Here is the official list of these unpledged delegates, who are mostly members of Congress or the Democratic National Committee.)

While Clinton leads Obama by a margin of 241-to-181 among superdelegates, according to an Associated Press survey, the largest category of these political free agents are the roughly 300 or so who have yet to make (or, at least, announce) a decision. If the Obama-Clinton race goes down to the wire, the superdelegates inevitably will put someone over the top, since neither candidate has a pathway to get to the magic number of 2,025 with pledged delegates alone. Yet most of them are far from eager to flex their political muscles. In truth, the majority of the superdelegates, for all their purported bend-steel-in-their-bare-hands powers, are rather cautious as they wait and hope for a consensus to develop within the party about the nominee.

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Take Bruce Braley, a first-term Iowa congressman, who had originally endorsed John Edwards before the opening-gun caucuses. Now, with Edwards out of the race, Braley is back on the fence and does not seem to be enjoying his perch one bit. "I don't want it to appear that I'm jumping on a bandwagon for some political benefit," he said Sunday in a telephone interview. "But at the same time, it's been something of a strain since I've received more arm-twisting since the Iowa caucuses than I ever did leading up to the caucuses."

Superdelegates have been an invisible part of the Democratic Party's landscape for more than a quarter-century. "Why have they lasted this long?" William Mayer, a political scientist at Northeastern University and an expert on presidential nomination battles, asked rhetorically. "The answer is because they haven't mattered. You can make an argument that they mattered in 1984, but then they were just ratifying the popular vote."

In 1984 -- the last time that the Democrats had a protracted and divisive nomination fight -- Walter Mondale earned about 600 more delegates than Gary Hart in the primaries and caucuses. But because there was a third candidate in the fray (Jesse Jackson), Mondale needed the support of more than 200 superdelegates to put him over the top. Anthony Corrado, who was tracking delegates for Mondale, said, "The choice was, are we going to have a brokered convention or are we going to bring the process to a close and start concentrating on the fall election?" Corrado, who now teaches government at Maine's Colby College, recalls with a laugh, "In 1984, there just wasn't much public discussion of superdelegates."

The superdelegates were created after the bitter Jimmy Carter-Ted Kennedy convention-floor fight in 1980. Elected officials, who had to endure the fallout from the presidential race but had no role in choosing a nominee, felt disenfranchised. As Louisiana Rep. Gillis Long, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, argued before a DNC reform commission in 1981, "We in the House, as the last vestige of Democratic control at the national level, believe we have a special responsibility to develop new innovative approaches that respond to our party's constituencies." (Elaine Kamarck, a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School and a current superdelegate, has posted online a highly useful history of these unpledged electors drawn from her 1986 doctoral dissertation).

This time around, though, a sense of illegitimacy surrounds superdelegates, as though there is something undemocratic about letting elected members of Congress and elected party officials vote on the convention floor. MoveOn.org has begun a petition drive demanding that superdelegates "let the voters decide between Clinton and Obama and then support the people's choice." There have been similar demands for the superdelegates to play robot and follow the vote of their congressional districts or states. (Of course, no one has explained what should happen when a state goes in one direction and a particular congressional district goes in another.) The Clinton campaign, which is far from a neutral arbiter, has had great fun in pointing out that this kind of voter sovereignty would force Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, both active Obama supporters, to back Hillary at the convention since the former first lady won the Massachusetts primary.

Next page: "Just like I vote in Washington, I don't abdicate that responsibility totally to my constituents"