Democratic Party superdelegates are undemocratic

http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/23/opinions/superdelegates-democratic-party-kohn/

By Sally Kohn, CNN Political Commentator

(CNN)You might think, from their title, that superdelegates are better than regular delegates.

Actually, they're worse.

The process for presidential elections in the United States is governed by the Constitution. Primary elections, however, are not. They are controlled by the political parties themselves. In fact, until the 1820s, members of Congress chose the presidential nominee for each party. That elitist system started to buckle with the advent of national conventions, though delegates were still selected through state and local convention processes controlled by the parties.

It wasn't until the mid-1900s that parties embraced primary elections as part of the process for deciding on presidential candidates. But to ensure that the voters themselves didn't have all the power, in 1982 the Democratic Party adopted what are called superdelegates, who today control 15% of the final nomination process.

The Republican Party has superdelegates, too, but they have a lot less power. GOP superdelegates are only about 7% of the nominating vote, and according to Republican convention rules, superdelegates must vote in accordance with their state primary outcomes.

It's in the Democratic Party that the outsized power and lack of accountability of superdelegates is supremely, well, undemocratic.

Specifically, after the Democratic caucuses in Nevada, CNN estimated that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were almost tied for pledged delegates, with 52 and 51 of them, respectively. And yet Clinton was leading by a much wider margin in the total delegate count because a whopping 445 superdelegates -- out of a total of 712 -- pledged to support her. By comparison, just 18 superdelegates pledged to support Sanders.

In other words, while Clinton and Sanders were almost perfectly split in the tally of voter-determined delegates, superdelegates threw their weight behind Clinton by an almost 25-to-1 ratio.

Any liberal who has ever been at a protest march for social justice has heard the popular chant: "This is what democracy looks like!" Well, superdelegates are definitely not what democracy looks like. Anything but.

So here's where it gets really interesting: In the 2008 Democratic primary, by at least some measures, more people actually voted for Clinton than for Barack Obama. But because of the way pledged delegates are counted and because Obama's team led an effort early on to lock down superdelegates, the math ultimately favored Obama, and Clinton dropped out. Clinton, in turn, learned not to dismantle the superdelegate system but to better play it, hiring the architect of Obama's superdelegate strategy to marshal hers this time around. And so fans of Sanders -- as well as, presumably, fans of democratic participation in general -- have launched efforts to call on superdelegates to reflect the will of the voters they represent and promise to support whichever candidate their state voters back. One such petition by MoveOn.org, has over 179,000 signatures. Another similar petition has almost 200,000 signatures.

Not so fast, says the Democratic Party. The uproar about superdelegates started after the New Hampshire primary. Sanders won 60% of the vote and, therefore, 15 of the state's pledged delegates. Clinton won just nine delegates. But nonetheless, Sanders and Clinton remained tied vis-a-vis New Hampshire delegates because six of the state's eight superdelegates backed Clinton.

CNN's Jake Tapper asked Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz why the Democratic Party would embrace such a plainly undemocratic process. Here's what she said:

"Unpledged delegates exist really to make sure that party leaders and elected officials don't have to be in a position where they are running against grassroots activists."

In other words, the Democratic Party's superdelegates exist to preserve the power and influence of the Democratic Party's elite. Well that makes perfect sense -- if you're, say, the inherently elitist, pro-big business, rich Republican Party. But not if you're supposed to be the party that protects the interests of regular Americans.

And sure, there's an argument to be made that both parties should have a fail-safe way to prevent the sort of cataclysmic disaster of the kind Donald Trump is creating by becoming the GOP nominee. But democracy is democracy, folks. We're supposed to stand by the process even if we don't like the outcome.

According to a new poll, nearly one in three Trump supporters in South Carolina supports banning gay people from entering the United States. That's horrifying. But the Republican Party has to reckon with those voters -- and the way in which Republican policies and rhetoric over the last several decades have given succor and solace to those views. Sweeping them under the rug via a superdelegate trouncing would be convenient but wrong.

Most of us know the quotes about democracy being messy or imperfect or the worst form of government except for all the others. Here's another quote: "Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy." That one comes from Mussolini, who was a fascist, and, perhaps if he were alive today, would be a superdelegate.

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Sanders the ‘Realist’; Hillary the ‘Neocon’

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/02/24/sanders-the-realist-hillary-the-neocon/

Exclusive: Sen. Sanders finds himself on the defensive in his uphill primary fight against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination in part because he shies away from defining himself as a “realist” and asking if she is a “neocon,” writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Hillary Clinton has scored points against Bernie Sanders by tagging him as a “single-issue candidate” who harps again and again on income inequality. Though the “single-issue” charge is false– the Vermont Senator actually addresses a wide range of topics from global warming to health care to college costs – Clinton’s attack line has been effective nonetheless

It works, in part, because Sanders shies away from thorough discussions about his views on foreign policy while Clinton can tout her résumé as a globetrotter both as First Lady and Secretary of State.

Sanders also has left himself open to attacks from neoconservatives and liberal interventionists that he is a “closet realist.” For instance, The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote recently: “Is Bernie Sanders a closet foreign policy ‘realist’? Reading his few pronouncements on foreign policy, you sense that he embraces the realists’ deep skepticism about U.S. military intervention.”

But what if Sanders came out of the closet and “confessed” to being a “realist” while posing the alternative question: Is Hillary Clinton a “closet neocon” who is seen by key neocons as “the vessel” in which they have placed their hopes for extending their power and expanding their policies? Might that question reenergize Sanders’s suddenly flagging campaign and force Clinton to venture beyond a few talking points on foreign policy?

Rather than largely ceding the field to Clinton – except in noting her Iraq War vote while he opposed that disastrous war of choice – Sanders could say, “yes, I’m a realist when it comes to foreign policy. I’m in line with early presidents – Washington, Adams, Jefferson – who warned about the dangers of foreign entanglements. While I believe America should lead in the world, it should not go ‘abroad in search of monsters to destroy,’ as John Quincy Adams wisely noted.

“I’m also in agreement with Dwight Eisenhower who warned about the dangers to the Republic from the Military-Industrial Complex – and I agree with John Kennedy who recognized the many legitimate concerns of Third World countries emerging from colonialism. I have learned from my own years in Congress that there’s no faster way to destroy a Republic than to behave as an Empire.”

Hiding Facts

Sanders could note, too, that the other way to destroy a Republic is to use the secrecy stamp too liberally, to hide too many key facts from the American people, not because of legitimate national security concerns but because it’s easier to manipulate a public that is fed a steady diet of propaganda. The American people, he might say, are citizens deserving respect, not mushrooms kept in the dark and fertilized.

On that point, Sanders might even note that he and Hillary Clinton may be in agreement, since the former Secretary of State’s team has complained that some of her infamous emails are now being classified retroactively in what her aides complain is an exercise in over-classification. Of course, the key reason for Clinton using a private server was to keep her communications hidden from later public scrutiny.

If Sanders is asked about specifics regarding where the line is between legitimate secrets and propagandistic manipulation, he could cite how President George W. Bush played games with intelligence by hyping claims about Iraq’s WMD and Saddam Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda.

Or Sanders could note the case of the sarin-gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, which almost drew President Barack Obama into a full-scale war in Syria.

If indeed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was responsible – as the Obama administration claimed and the mainstream U.S. news media repeats endlessly – then the U.S. government should present the evidence to the American people. Or, if one of the jihadist rebel groups was behind the attack – trying to trick the U.S. into joining the war on the jihadist side – lay that evidence out even if it means admitting to a rush-to-judgment against Assad’s forces. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case.”]

Similarly, on the issue of Ukraine: if the former government of President Viktor Yanukovych was at fault for the Maidan sniper attacks on Feb. 20, 2014, as was widely alleged at the time, put forward the evidence. If the snipers were extremists among the Maidan protesters trying to create a provocation – as more recent evidence suggests – give those facts to the American people.

The same applies to the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. Yes, the suggestion that Russia was responsible has proved to be an effective propaganda club to beat Vladimir Putin over the head, but if the tragedy was really the fault of some element of the U.S.-backed Ukrainian regime – and if U.S. intelligence knows that – fess up. Stop the game-playing.

Who’s in Charge?

It should not be the job of the U.S. government to mislead and confuse the American people. That reverses the proper order of a Republic in which “We the People” are the sovereigns and government officials are the servants.

Sanders might say, too, that he realizes neoconservatives believe in tricking the American people to support preordained policies that the neocons have cooked up in one of their think tanks, as happened with the Iraq War and the Project for the New American Century.

But a Sanders administration, he might say, would show respect for the citizenry, putting the people back in charge and putting the think tanks – which live off the largesse of the Military-Industrial Complex – back in their subordinate place.

Yes, it’s true that such a call for democracy, truth and pragmatism would infuriate the mainstream media, which has largely accepted its role as a propaganda organ for the neocons. But Sanders could take on that fight, much as Donald Trump has on the Republican side.

It was Trump who finally confronted the Republican Party with the reality about George W. Bush’s negligence prior to the 9/11 attacks and his deceptions about Iraq’s WMD. So far, it appears that the Republican base can handle the truth.

The GOP establishment’s frantic efforts to sustain the fictions that Bush “kept us safe” and his supposed sincerity in believing his WMD falsehoods fell flat in South Carolina where Trump trounced the Republican field and forced Bush’s brother Jeb to drop out of the race.

Does Sanders have the courage to believe that the Democratic base is at least as ready for the truth about Hillary Clinton’s entanglement in the serial deceptions that have justified a host of U.S. imperial wars, including the current ones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria? Sanders might even respond to the accusations that he is a “closet realist” by not just admitting to his foreign policy pragmatism but asking whether Hillary Clinton is a “closet neocon.”

After all, Robert Kagan, who co-founded the neocon Project for the American Century, told The New York Times in 2014 that he hoped that his neocon views – which he now prefers to call “liberal interventionist” – would prevail in a possible Hillary Clinton administration.

Secretary of State Clinton named Kagan to one of her State Department advisory boards and promoted his wife, neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who oversaw the provocative “regime change” in Ukraine in 2014.

The Times reported that Clinton “remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes” and quoted Kagan as saying: “I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy. …  If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue … it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Indeed, with populist billionaire Donald Trump seizing control of the Republican race with victories in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, the neocons may find themselves fully siding with Hillary Clinton’s campaign as it becomes the last hope for their interventionist strategies. Ironically, too, many “realists” and anti-war activists may find Trump’s rejection of neocon orthodoxy and readiness to cooperate with Moscow to resolve conflicts more appealing than Clinton’s hopped-up belligerence.

Obviously, many anti-war Democrats would prefer that Sanders step forward as their champion and offer a cogent explanation about how the neocons and liberal hawks have harmed U.S. and world interests by spreading chaos across the Middle East and now into North Africa and Europe. But that would require Sanders embracing the word “realist” and asking whether his rival is a “neocon.”

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

The Democrats versus democracy

Lance Selfa, author of The Democrats: A Critical History, explains how the party that claims to represent workers has been set up to make sure they have no power.

http://socialistworker.org/2016/02/23/the-democrats-versus-democracy

EARLIER THIS month, Hillary Clinton lost the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary to Vermont Sen. and self-described socialist Bernie Sanders by a landslide margin.

But when the New Hampshire delegates to the party's nominating convention this summer were tallied up, Clinton and Sanders came away with 15 each.

How could Clinton lose by more than 20 percentage points and still get as many delegates pledged to support her as Sanders? The answer: Most of the Democratic Party "superdelegates" in the state, including Gov. Maggie Hassan and U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen--announced that they are supporting Clinton.

So even though Sanders won almost twice as many delegates as Clinton among those awarded based on the election results, the support of the superdelegates pulled Clinton into a tie in the state where she was trounced at the ballot box.

This is further evidence of a fact of politics, not just in the U.S., but around the world: Just because an organization has "democratic" in its name doesn't mean it functions according to even basic concepts of democracy.

The "superdelegates" are a group of more than 700 Democratic officeholders (including all Democratic governors and members of Congress), Democratic National Committee members, union officials, lower-level party apparatchiks and miscellaneous members of the Democratic infrastructure (fundraisers, consultants, pollsters and the like) who collectively occupy one in every six or seven delegate seats at the Democratic National Convention.

At the convention, the superdelegates cast votes alongside those won by the candidates through competing in the party's caucuses and primaries.

That makes it possible for one candidate to arrive at the convention with a majority of pledged delegates, only to have the nomination handed to another based on the vote of the superdelegates.

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THE SUPERDELEGATES are a product of the Democratic Party machine's backlash against an opening up in the 1960s. The Democrats experienced a fiasco at their convention in Chicago in 1968, when the party bosses, led by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, chose Vice President Hubert Humphrey as the presidential candidate, despite Humphrey not competing in a single party primary.

To appease disgruntled liberals, the party afterward appointed a commission, led by Sen. George McGovern and Rep. Donald Fraser, to draw up rules for selecting convention delegates that enforced affirmative action and required that they be chosen in primaries or caucuses, rather than by party leaders.

Under those rules, the next two Democratic conventions chose one candidate (McGovern) who lost in an historic landslide to Richard Nixon in 1972 and another (Jimmy Carter) who won, but came to Washington as an "outsider." In 1972, much of the party establishment refused to support McGovern on the grounds that he was too liberal. And much of Carter's weak presidency was consumed with squabbles between the White House and the Democratic insiders in Congress.

Once Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party bosses struck back with new rules intended to place themselves more fully at the center of the process of selecting a presidential nominee. They realized they couldn't go back to the days when all-important matters were decided the infamous "smoke-filled backrooms"--so they went only part of the way back, arriving at the superdelegate system.

A Wall Street Journal article cited Tad Devine, "a Democratic strategist who helped write the rules," as explaining, "The idea was to encourage the party's officeholders to attend the convention and provide a firewall in case someone unelectable--say, a Huey Long populist or Norman Thomas socialist--swept the primaries."

That citing of Devine is ironic because Devine today is one of Bernie Sanders' main advisers--and probably his chief liaison to the Democratic Party itself. We can only speculate if he would describe Sanders as a "Norman Thomas socialist." But even if his views on the superdelegate system have changed, his comment speaks to a question that goes beyond just the party rules.

Devine is a corporate lawyer who has worked as an adviser and political operative in numerous Democratic campaigns since the early 1980s. Even if he's "feeling the Bern" now, there are thousands more people just like him who staff the Democratic Party apparatus at all levels. Many move between the corporate, non-profit and government sectors with ease.

When a Democratic administration takes over in a city, a state, a house of Congress or the White House, that layer of people like Devine expect political appointments, jobs, government contracts and lobbying gigs, not to mention positions as media commentators. It's likewise with the Republicans when their party takes office.

To the extent that a party establishment exists in either the Democrats or Republicans, these are its most committed apparatchiks. But they are, to a certain extent, merely "hired hands." Beyond them lie other institutions and networks, overwhelmingly funded with corporate money, that shape the political environment in which they operate.

In the book The Party Decides, Marty Cohen and his colleagues argue that the two pro-corporate parties need to be understood as not just elected officials, but also "religious organizations, civil rights groups...organizers, fundraisers, pollsters and media specialists" and even "citizen activists who join the political fray as weekend warriors."

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THE POINT here is that "the party," broadly defined like this, organizes a number of interests that, while invested in the Democrats winning elections, are also biased to taking as few risks as possible to achieve that. So when union leaderships or a Congressional Black Caucus PAC that is stuffed with corporate lobbyists announce their endorsement of Hillary Clinton without consulting their memberships or bases of political support, they are simply showing a bias to preserving the status quo.

In fact, very few of the leaders of liberal organizations who back Clinton can say why they prefer her policies over those of Sanders, who has been a far more consistent progressive advocate throughout his career.

If they're backing Clinton because they think she's "electable," we have to ask why. And here's where corporate money and influence raise their heads.

The first thing to consider here is who even becomes a "viable" candidate. In national elections, where the costs run into the billions, corporate money exceeds money from labor unions or average voters by orders of magnitude. Given that, it's a rare politician who emerges who would seriously challenge corporate policies or control of the economy.

The two main political parties are conduits of corporate and individual wealth. They perform the function of officially nominating candidates, providing the label under which they run, and an easy identification for voters to use when they choose between them. But before they get the party stamp of approval, candidates have already won the "money primary," signifying that Corporate America has signed off on them. As Thomas Ferguson argues in his book Golden Rule, "[P]arties are more accurately analyzed as blocs of major investors who coalesce to advance candidates representing their interests."

Secondly, what political policies are considered "viable"? These are also policies that have been cleared by corporate power--hatched in the nonprofit think tanks they fund, if not written by corporate lobbyists themselves.

One particularly crude example of this was former Big Pharma lobbyist Liz Fowler, who helped to write the Affordable Care Act as a chief adviser to Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus of Montana, then helped administer it as an official at Obama's Health and Human Services Department--and then departed government for a post with Johnson & Johnson.

Given that, consider Bernie Sanders' support for single-payer health care. There's nothing inherently impossible or "un-American" about creating one. Quasi-single-payer systems already exist for the elderly and veterans--they're called Medicare and the VA.

But good luck finding more than a handful of experts who would testify in Congress in favor of single-payer. That's because most health-care experts are products of the privately controlled health care industry that funds research organizations, university institutes and lobbying organizations--and one of their main tenets is that single-payer health care is beyond the pale.

Then there's the mainstream media, which, we should not forget, are capitalist enterprises dedicated far more to retailing "conventional wisdom" than covering what is actually happening in the political world. It's remarkable that Sanders has gained the support and general visibility he has given that the media--not known for promoting "socialism"--virtually ignored him all last year.

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SO THE Democratic Party's superdelegates are only one tool in the corporate and political establishment's toolkit for thwarting a popular will that might demand more change than the establishment is prepared to allow. By shaping the political environment and leaning on well-developed networks dedicated to maintaining the pro-corporate status quo, this elite have many ways to keep control--superdelegates are only one of them.

And if their manipulation of funding and party rules don't work, corporations and their Democratic Party lackeys can always withdraw support from a rebel candidate who somehow defies them and gets nominated. Ultimately, the party apparatus prefers for the rebel to go down to defeat rather than use the party to advance an anti-corporate agenda.

The classic example of this was the Democrats' all-out war against Upton Sinclair, the long-time socialist writer who won the party's nomination for governor of California in the midst of the Great Depression in 1934, running on a progressive platform and the slogan "End Poverty in California."

The Democratic establishment, from President Franklin Roosevelt on down, funded a red-baiting scare campaign against Sinclair, created a fake third party to siphon votes from him, and ultimately guaranteed re-election for the Republican Gov. Frank Merriam.

Despite the enthusiasm of his supporters, his success at raising money based on small donations--and even winning more votes than Clinton in the early primary races so far--Bernie Sanders is still operating at a huge disadvantage to Hillary Clinton. No wonder so many people think the political system is rigged.