If I Were A Superdelegate |
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Copyright © 2008 Soy-n-Joy® If I Were A Superdelegate.... It was Sunday morning, April 27, 2008. I was listening to Tim Russert interviewing Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Convention (DNC), on "Meet The Press" on NBC. Russert asked Dean whether Dean would allow Florida and Michigan Democratic voters to a revote, given that the two states were not included in delegate counts for either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Dean answered in the negative, saying that because the two states violated DNC rule by scheduling their primaries ahead of DNC schedule, they should be penalized for jumping the queue. Apparently, in Dean's thinking, the two states' Democratic Party organs' refusing to heed the instructions of the DNC had trumped the democratic rights of Democratic voters in the two states. That is not unlike penalizing the human rights of certain countries because of some misbehavior of their governments. Such anti-democratic decisions by the Democratic Party only reinforces the arguments of Kishore Mahbubani, who wrote the book "The New Asian Hemisphere," and advocated in his BBC interview that, from history's perspective, the West had retrograded on human rights and liberty, while the East was advancing by leaps and bounds in those aspects. The DNC should, in the interest of protecting voters' democratic rights, allow a re-vote in those two states, and choose to penalize the unruly state party organs in some other ways. Later the same morning I was watching George Stephanopoulos interviewing Democratic Party superdelegates, two representing each camp of Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama, on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." Clinton's camp argued that superdelegates should cast their super votes based on the direction of popular vote counts, on the argument that the popular vote reflects the ultimate voters' wish. Obama's camp, on the other hand, insisted that superdelegates should cast their votes based on the direction of electoral vote counts, because the Democratic primary system was designed based on the "fair," proportional allocation of electoral votes. Both camps put forward their respective proposition based on the same criterion: to give their respective candidate the best chance of winning the nomination. Both camps, however, seemed to have forgotten that in the real presidential election, the mechanism for allocating state electoral votes, and hence for determining who wins the White House, is "Winner Take All." If the Democratic Party's goal is to win the presidential election in November, the superdelegates had better adopt a strategy that would generate a nominee who would have the best chance of winning the states' electoral votes by the "Winner Take All" mechanism. If the primaries were a prelude testing the grounds for the ultimate, general election, then the candidate most likely to dominate in a "Winner Take All" scenario is the most desirable candidate. However, neither the popular vote approach nor the electoral vote approach advocated by each respective camp was aligned with that strategy to generate the most desirable candidate. The Democratic Party superdelegates should therefore find a way to take the "Winner Take All" mechanism into consideration in casting their decisive votes to determine who their presidential nominee should be. Unlike popular vote or proportional electoral vote, "Winner Take All" is the only system in sync with the presidential election system. It is also a simple and objective system grounded in the fairness of a common starting line. Adopted by the Republican Party primaries, it has already generated a presumptive presidential nominee in John McCain, effectively and efficiently. To make it work for the Democratic Party superdelegates to come up with their own presumptive presidential nominee, equally effectively and efficiently, all they need to do is to sum up the state-by-state electoral vote counts based on the assumption that the states have been won by the candidates on a "Winner Take All" mechanism. Then one candidate with the best chance of winning should emerge. The superdelegates should then cast their super votes to this candidate and put him or her over the top for the required 2,025 votes for nomination. If I were a superdelegate, and I had already exercised my duty, collectively with my class of superdelegate colleagues, to determine who the Democratic Party presidential nominee should be, I would put forward a motion to the Democratic Party that superdelegates be abolished as a class collectively after 2008, because superdelegates, who trumped the "one-person-one-vote" principle of democracy and were created to resolve an issue that should not have existed in the first place, were, simply and obviously, anti-democratic by their very existence. I would also put forward a motion that, in future Democratic Party primaries, the mechanism of "winner take all" be instituted for electoral vote allocation, rather than by the mechanism of proportional representation, and that would most likely get rid of the issue of deadlocks once and for all. Howard Dean will be relieved of all the headaches bugging him, and be answerable to his conscience, if he will allow re-votes in Florida and Michigan before the Democratic Convention, inspire his superdelegates to adopt "Winner take All" in casting their super votes this year, and get rid of the superfluous superdelegates for good. First Posted 4-27-08 If you have any questions or comments, please e-mail us at contactus@soynjoy.net. |