The Superdelegate Solution

Hand wringing is rampant. Where did the Democratic Party's super delegates come from? What will they do? What should they do? For all of these questions, some party candidate nomination history is in order. The long view shows a steady march in the direction of democratizing the process. In the earliest days, fledgling political parties used a caucus system which was limited to party adherents in Congress, but it was apparent that those districts held by the opposition party had no voice. Soon, a "mixed caucus" was devised, permitting the inclusion of participants from those districts as well. By the 1820s, the caucus arrangement was discredited and Andy Jackson successfully helped to orchestrate a reform movement which culminated in the convention system--a portion of which still remains at the national level.

It wasn't long before the local, state, and national conventions also succumbed to "smoke-filled, back room" political control during the heyday of machine politics and party bosses. Beginning in 1910, states began to experiment with the use of direct primaries, and again the effort was driven by the desire to make the process more open, more accessible, more democratic. Although primaries became very popular for selecting candidates at the state and local levels, inertia set in with regard to selecting presidential candidates, and caucuses/conventions remained in place in most states. Indeed, in 1968, a tumultuous year in the Democratic Party, only 15 states and the District of Columbia held presidential primaries, thus enabling Hubert Humphrey to capture the nomination without winning a single primary contest.

That year witnessed a divisive struggle among Democrats, exacerbated by the tragic death of Bobby Kennedy who embodied the hopes of many anti-war activists. In an effort to repair the Party's division, the McGovern-Frazier Commission was formed for the purpose of examining the candidate selection process. That group proposed eighteen reforms of which four were critical to the selection cycle in 1972 and beyond: 1) no delegates to be chosen prior to January 1st of the election year; 2) eliminate the "winner-take-all" or unit rule (still practiced by the Republican Party) and replace it with proportional selection; 3) guarantee diversity within each state delegation--including 50% women and a proportion of young people, minorities, and the poor; 4) widely publicize each state's delegate selection process.

The impact of these democratizing efforts cannot be exaggerated. They resulted in three substantial changes. First, the number of states holding primaries rather than caucuses/conventions doubled between 1968 and 1972. Second, the composition of the 1972 convention was starkly different from that of 1968. It was estimated that whereas in 1968 some 55% of all delegates were "professionals" (e.g., public officials or party officials--those who made their living from party engagement) only 10% fit that category in 1972. Emblematic of the change was the fact that in 1968, Richard Daley, the legendary mayor of Chicago who was instrumental in orchestrating Humphrey's success at the convention in his city, shunned the 1972 event and was not a delegate. In his place, there might have been a twenty-three year old African American woman, who would have satisfied several of the "diversity" requirements of the Illinois delegation. That symbolic change would have dramatic repercussions. In his capacity as a big-city machine mayor, Daley could order his legions of party workers to hit the streets in Chicago and generate a large voter turnout for Humphrey on election day, but the young black woman might have convinced only a few family members and her close friends to support George McGovern four years later. In short, the conversion of the convention make-ups from professionals to amateurs was a costly one. The third change was largely the result of the second. It was a shift from a middle-of-the-road, balanced delegate make up to one which was more ideologically driven. Put simply, producing the "right" candidate became more important than producing the "winning" one.

Having been blown away in the 1972 presidential election and then producing a weak candidate/president in Jimmy Carter, many party members became convinced that efforts to democratize the candidate selection process had gone too far. That conviction led to the creation of the Hunt Commission in 1980 which proposed a new category of "super delegates" who would compose about 14% of each state delegation (now about 20%). That group would include major elected officials, prominent party members and a small number of hand-picked party loyalists. It would represent a modest return to professionalism and would redress the balance between those delegates who were ideologically committed and those who sought candidates who could win.

So, what should this year's super delegates do? The simple answer is they should support the most electable candidate. Since there are no distinguishing idealogical differences between Clinton and Obama, the answer seems even easier. But that simple solution can become complicated. It may not be just a matter of seeing which candidate runs strongest against McCain in the national polls. It may also be a matter of assessing which group of Clinton/Obama supporters will be most offended and most difficult to retrieve if their champion is denied the nomination. That level of damage is not assessed in the national polls, but it could be the critical determinant in November.

Political Parties, Geography, and Demographics: The Old Days and the New

Painting with a big brush is sloppy, but sometimes it helps to sort things out. Let's look at the major political parties in the old days and today.

The New Deal coalition of FDR pasted together liberal forces rooted in the Northeast, centered in his home state of New York, and southern, white conservatives who had inherited a dislike of the "Bloody Shirt" Republicans tracking back to the "War of Northern Aggression."

The mid-Twentieth Century GOP contained two wings. One was conservative on matters of foreign, social, and economic policy and was rooted in the mid-west. Its most prominent spokesman was Senator Robert "Mr. Conservative" Taft, of Ohio. Its values had been largely embraced by the 1936 Republican presidential candidate, Alf Landon, of Kansas. With the disastrous electoral loss of that year, a more moderate wing of the Party emerged ascendant, accepting most of FDR's innovative policies, such as Social Security, unemployment compensation, and a minimum wage. The presidential candidates of the 1940s and 1950s, Tom Dewey (1944,1948)and Dwight Eisenhower (1952, 1956) reflected that ideology.

But both the northern/liberally dominated coalition of FDR and the moderate domination of the New York based GOP were fragile and open to challenge. Within the Democratic ranks, fissures broke out during the 1948 campaign of FDR's successor, Harry Truman, when South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond bolted the party and led the short-lived "Dixiecrats" in revolt. The southern Democrats were deeply disturbed over the northern, liberal emphasis on civil rights and what they derogatorily labeled "social engineering"--a panoply of policies which reached into and interfered with their personal lives.

Many conservative Republicans, too, were unhappy with what they saw as their moderate wing's cozying up too closely with the National Democrats. Arizona's senator, Barry Goldwater led the revolt in 1964 with his clarion call for "A Choice, Not an Echo!" While the nation appeared unready for the "Choice" and he carried only five states, including his own, in the general election against LBJ, tellingly, all four of the other states were located in the deep south.

At the same time many pundits were proclaiming the GOP's demise, a young Goldwaterite, Kevin Phillips, was convinced that his Republican Party could rise again if it made some basic changes. After surveying the political landscape, Phillips noted that the most volatile section of the nation was the deep and outer South, the eleven states of the old Confederacy. His reasoning, simply put was this: Many Republicans in the early 1960s had been opposed to the civil rights movement, and particularly to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 because they envisioned newly enfranchised Blacks as inexorably voting Democratic, thus strengthening the opposition party. But Phillips put a different slant on it. He argued that the Dixiecrats had been a "way station" for disaffected Democrats in 1948, and that as Goldwater later demonstrated, they were now ready to change party allegiance, if the Republicans played their cards right.

Rather than lamenting the growth of Black voting strength in the South, Republicans should encourage it. His reasoning was fourfold. First, since Blacks did not constitute more than about 25% of the population in any southern state, and often much less, they could not muster a majority in any of those states. Second, as Blacks increased their voting strength, they would gradually take control of the state Democratic Party apparatus. Third, their ascendancy in the Party would leave the traditional, dominant, white Democrats with nowhere to turn--except the Republican Party. Fourth, the Republicans should play down civil rights and "social engineering" in order to win over that crucial bloc of voters. Finally, he reasoned that if the South fell into the Republican column, it would tip the party scales and create what he called "The Emerging Republican Majority," the title of his later book. In 1967, he took his plan to Richard Nixon's New York law partner, John Mitchell, who was captivated by Phillips' ideas. He, in turn, sold Nixon on them, and when Nixon ran in 1968, with Mitchell as his campaign manager (later attorney general), the Phillips plan became known as "the southern strategy."

Thus, the stage was set for 1980, and the coming of the conservative Ronald Reagan, who capitalized on the Phillips groundwork and rode the backs of "Reagan Democrats" to victory. By the end of his eight years, the once "Solid South" had become a bastion of Republican Party strength.

Jumping ahead to today, it may be argued that the "southern strategy" which worked so well for the Republicans in the late Twentieth Century was ill-fated because it was based on the false notion of a permanent non-white minority. Where once, in the 1960s, roughly one out of every eleven Americans was non-white, today, particularly with the sharp rise in the Hispanic population, that number is one-third. Indeed, by 2050, it is projected that whites will no longer be a majority at all! How revealing it is that all of the original GOP candidates this year were white men, whereas the two "finalists" in the Democratic Party are a woman and a black man. Perhaps the time has come for a new, more inclusive strategy.

Hillary, Barack, and Party Divisiveness

Many Democrats have expressed grave concern over the continuing battle between Barack and Hillary. Their reasoning suggests that the longer it goes on--perhaps into the convention itself--the more likely it is to divide the party, with the result that McCain will triumph in the fall. Nonsense. Quite the opposite. The party will benefit from the fray, and here's why. First of all, the intra-party conflict will attract enormous press attention to both, and indirectly to the Democratic Party. There will be a corresponding loss of focus on the Republicans and their standard bearer. Second, they will not carve up each other because the stakes are too high. Obama cannot afford to alienate Clinton's base and she cannot offend his. Third, as there is no major difference between them on issues of substance, such as Iraq, the economy, and health care, there are no grounds on which the party might divide ideologically. This fact alone distinguishes the current fight from others in the past, such as 1968, where Viet Nam separated the left from the center of the Democratic Party. This contest is rather about gender, race, style, experience, and personality. It separates young people from older folks, African American voters from some whites, middle aged and older women from men and younger women. blue collar workers from highly educated white collar workers.

To be sure, there are some large questions about each candidate. For example, does Hillary suffer from so many negatives that she won't be able to woo the independent swing voters in November? Is Barack sufficiently vetted to withstand withering attacks from the general election opposition? But these are not the kinds of questions which will permanently split a party, nor are preferences for a woman, a Black, an experienced hand, or the vigor of youth.

Differences there are, that's for sure. But insurmountable ones? Nope. Each candidate possesses great strength, and each one assiduously avoids the missteps which could cause an irreparable breech. This is one civil war which is indeed civil, and it will benefit the Democratic Party.