Democrats battle for presidential nomination


Times Correspondent

The battle for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination resembles a ping-pong match at which nobody is quite sure of the score.

News organizations confidently tout delegate counters, yet none of them display the same numbers. At various points, the campaigns of U.S. Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Barack Obama, D-Ill., have simultaneously declared their candidates the leaders.

It is clear that both have held the lead at different points and that the lead, which currently belongs to Obama, has always been razor-thin. It is so thin, in fact, that one of the odd birds of American electoral politics - the superdelegate - is garnering some potentially unwanted attention.

The majority of the 4,049 delegates who participate in the Democratic nomination are essentially beholden to the results of the caucuses or primaries in their state, divided proportionally according to district votes or caucus support.

But 796 of them are known as superdelegates, or automatic delegates, as Stamford automatic delegate Ellen Camhi prefers to be called. The group consists of elected officials, including members of Congress, governors and Democratic National Committee members elected at state conventions, who vote as they please at the national convention irrespective of voting results in their states.

The superdelegate phenomenon was created by the party after the 1980 election to give added weight and easy convention access to people active in the party. It has flown under the radar ever since.

Now, with Obama and Clinton running almost even toward the convention, the possibility that a handful of votes, much less 796, will swing the election has cast the superdelegates in a powerful new light.

Even with Obama's primary sweep last week, it is probable that neither he nor Clinton will have the 2,025 votes necessary to claim the nomination before the August convention in Denver. In that case the Democrats place in the general election would come down to the candidate's ability to persuade superdelegates to join their ranks.

Steven Berizzi, a political science and history professor at Norwalk Community College, said such a scenario "would bring attention to the undemocratic nature of the process."

A registered Democrat, Berizzi said he harbored no ill feelings toward party officials and activists, but said it was hard to accept an allegedly democratic system in which certain party members held the upper hand.

"Insiders are out of favor right now and I'd prefer a process that was more transparent, to borrow the cliché of the moment," he said.

Another cliché of the superdelegate moment, that of politicians in smoke-filled convention center rooms cutting deals that determine political destiny long after the public has had its say, is a real concern, Berizzi said.

"There was a time, in my lifetime, when the conventions were enormously important and the nominee was selected there," he said. "It made for great theater and great TV, but I'm not sure it was good for democracy. To the extent that we're moving back to putting power into the convention, I'm not sure if that's a good shift of the pendulum."

Camhi, the Stamford superdelegate by way of her post in the DNC, said the image of automatic delegates as power brokers was trumped up.

"There's no network for that to happen," she said. "We're all individuals and we do what we feel is best for the party."

Clinton was initially expected to have an advantage among party regulars because of her long affiliation with the upper ranks of Democratic power.

The picture is less clear now that Obama has been staked to a lead with 15 states left to vote, though Clinton still leads in tentative public pledges from superdelegates.

In Connecticut, Camhi is the only automatic delegate to have pledged her support for Clinton. Three other DNC members have announced they will vote for Obama, as have three of the state's four Democratic U.S. representatives.

U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., who dropped his presidential candidacy earlier in the campaign, has not yet pledged support for either candidate.

Of course, pledges are subject to change until superdelegates cast their votes at the convention. Charting their allegiances is as official as an informal poll for a popular vote.

Camhi, who has been a member of the DNC since 1988 and is up for re-election this year, said she imagined that automatic delegates were less subject to momentum swings than the general public because they had stronger opinions based on their familiarity with the candidates and the party.

However, she also said that the automatic delegates' role is "about choosing who is the most electable or representative in their minds," a posture that can change depending on primary and caucus results.

Given the vitriol of the campaign, Camhi said superdelegates provide a rallying point for reuniting the party ahead of the general election when others may only be interested in supporting their candidate.

"Whoever gets the nomination, we'll be behind them," she said. "That commitment is never in question."

Superdelegates are not the only anomalous characteristic of the U.S. election system, and they wouldn't be the first to escape criticism unscathed. A much more entrenched feature - the Electoral College - has been lambasted for being undemocratic but carries on without change.

The state-by-state, winner-take-all system allowed George W. Bush to ascend to the presidency after the 2000 election despite losing the overall popular vote to Al Gore. Public outrage carried through to the Supreme Court decision that finally handed the poll to Bush.

"There was a lot of attention for a few weeks or months, but no serious efforts were made to change the system," Berizzi said. "My guess is that (superdelegates) become a non-issue for the next three-plus years until the next convention."