Monday, February 04, 2008

Are superdelegates not so super?

With many observers calling the Democratic presidential race too close to call -- and holding out the possibility that this situation will persist after Super Tuesday -- we've heard a little talk of how superdelegates could play a decisive role.

Yesterday, though, in a piece that offers a strong historical perspective, Matt Bai questions this theory, and he posits the 2008 presidential election as part of a looming generational watershed.

All of American society, including our politics, has changed in the last 24 years, with the continued decline of centralized institutions. Blind loyalty to organizations has been replaced by a kind of skeptical free agency. If you needed an insurance policy in 1984, you probably called the agent who had been with your family for years; now, as with so much else, you go online and find the lowest price in the time it would take to file your nails. As Obama found out in Nevada, where he won the endorsement of the Culinary Workers Union but lost a lot of its members’ votes, even union workers, once considered a monolithic bloc, no longer blindly follow their leaders’ dictates, preferring instead to choose for themselves.

In this new world, who is to say that the party’s superdelegates would still vote as the reliable instruments of the Democratic establishment? And even if they did, who is to say that other Democrats would tolerate a nomination brokered by a bunch of insiders? In the blog age, such events would likely turn the party upside down.

Or perhaps 2008 will mark the lasp gasp of the passing generation:

Obama’s emergence as a serious contender for the nomination has been framed, in historic terms, as a racial marker, but it also signals the beginning of the end of what history may record as a fruitless political era. We may have another boomer president in 2009, and maybe even another after that. (Four years after Hart first ran, after all, the country elected the last of the World War II veterans, George H. W. Bush.) But from here on out, as it did after Hart’s campaign, the balance will shift until ultimately the “Top Gun” generation has pushed aside the boomer establishment. Viewed through this prism, the talk about superdelegates has an almost poetic cadence to it. How fitting it would be if 24 years after Mondale called in his party chits to hold off the onslaught of younger Democrats, the Clintons were compelled to do the same.

2008 presidential race | Democrats | Obama