Putting the "Super" back into super delegates

Posted by Seth Mooney, AlterNet at 8:34 AM on May 27, 2008.

One critical issue of this election season centers on the idea that in a democracy, there is some kind of agreement between the People and the Government, an agreement to which both parties are accountable. The American Government hasn’t been very accountable to its People (or objective reality, for that matter) ever since the democratic process was hijacked in 2000 from voters Florida at the expense of voters everywhere.

Now, Democratic super delegates are positioned to hijack the democratic process from their own party. In response, Agit-Pop Communications has launched the first in what will hopefully be a series of hip and fact-dense videos on the super delegate problem.

It may seem like a stretch to suggest that a coup-de-tat within the Democratic Party would be as bad as the theft of the Presidency that happened in 2000. That’s certainly farther than Agit-Pop takes the "super delegate Issue" in this slick video. But one sad truth of the matter is that we no longer talk about fact that the election of 2000 was stolen because we understand that the rules of the game allowed for the theft. And it is exactly the same kind of idiotic rules that stand to erase the last traces of democratic electoral accountability from American political life now in 2008.

The Super delegates amount to 2008’s version of the US Senate in 2000. The rules in 2000 said that so long as Senators were o.k. with democracy being stolen in Florida, the concerns of Representatives were unimportant. The Democratic Party’s rules let super delegates cast their powerful votes irrespective of the democratically expressed will of their constituents within the party. In short, the concerns of voters will once again be rendered wholly meaningless, if the super delegates do what Hillary Rodham can only be hoping they will do.

What she is no doubt hoping for is the super delegates’ complicity in hijacking the democratic process from the Democratic Party. To become the party’s nominee, she needs the super delegates to show that the party doesn’t care any more about the democratic process than the Supreme Court, the Senate, or the thieves in Florida cared in 2000.

For a long time now the Democratic Party has been trying to win by beating the Republican Party at its own game. Americans have reason now, more than ever, to suspect that the Democratic Party isn’t a real alternative to the thieves and charlatans that hijacked the American Government eight years ago. Now, with Hillary Rodham’s continued campaigning in defiance of the majority of Democratic voters, and with so many of the super delegates complicit by not acting to end the charade before it can become reality, the Democratic Party may expose itself as a master of the means of Republican theft and chicanery as well.

No American alive today is likely to outlive the blemished reputation that comes along with the Bush presidency. Starting with the theft of the government from the People, the American legacy and human history have been marred. Democrats like to think that it will mean something for the Democratic Party to "take back" the White House this fall. But it only can be meaningful if a Democrat wins the White House democratically. If the Super delegates make themselves Hillary’s cronies, if they betray the democratic process as it was betrayed in 2000 by Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, and the Senate, it will be hard to believe that "democracy in America" means much of anything at the Federal level.

Check out whitehouserocks.com for more info on the video, and to sign a petition for super delegate accountability.

Tagged as: democrat, cartoons, election 2008, primaries, delegates, presidential primaries, super delegates