A quote from one of this year's superdelegates:

[noamnety]

"What we do is. . . we are an organization of incumbents, and while we certainly find challengers who go up against incumbents, we support incumbents,"

- Schumer, talking about why the DSCC might endorse Lieberman in the general election even if the voting public picks Lamont over him.

He belongs to an organization whose function - as he lays it out for us - is to use the old boys network to keep establishment people in power, and prevent new people from having an equal shot at elected office - even if it means going against the will of the voters.

[dsc]

1. of course the DSCC endorsed, Lamont, as you well know.

[noamnety]

6. Eventually, after the primaries, yes.

This is a quote from him before that point in time, where he was unable to commit to supporting the winner of the primaries, because one of their missions is to protect the establishment from nonestablishment candidates. He's explaining why that might be a higher priority to him than what the voters want.

[whistle]

2. In otherwords super delegates = cronyism

[Yossariant]

3. Please define "the will of the voters" -- as opposed to the will of Obama's voters.

[noamnety]

4. I don't support Obama, just so we're clear on potential bias here.

I've made that obvious in several other posts. I'm talking about a problem with superdelegates as a concept being inherently unfair, because those in power have a self-serving interest in keeping their own asses in power and protecting their own.

[Yossariant]

5. I'm just asking for a definition of "the will of the voters."

I keep asking every time someone mentions it, but I have yet to get a straight answer from anybody.

:shrug:

[noamnety]

8. Seems pretty straight forward to me.

I don't understand the confusion.

Most voters mark off X on their ballot, X is the will of the voters.

(ignoring the influence of the media, lobbying money and donations for the DSCC good old boy network, that is)

Is there some other interpretation you're expecting, other than the will of the voters being the election results?

[Yossariant]

11. Are you defining "the will of the voters" to be the most votes overall, across the country?

[noamnety]

12. Ideally, that would be nice.

We don't do that. Hell if I know why.

Next closest thing is by primary votes divided up by states. So I settle.

The farthest thing from it is the establishment picks superdelegates, and it's in their own best interest to protect their own. I don't want people who are in the pockets of lobbyists having motivation to elect the other candidates who are most in the pockets of those same lobbyists. They should have the same one vote the rest of us get, not 10,000 of those votes.

If I apply for a new job, I don't get to pick who is going to sit on the hiring committee. And my cronies should get to pick that either. There's a reason for that.

[formernaderite]

7. this of course doesn't include

the state level elected superdelegates, who can be complete political novices and have held NO office at all.

[noamnety]

9. I was going off this list

http://demconwatch.blogspot.com/2008/01/superdelegate-list.html

"Many party leaders felt that the delegates would actually be more representative of all Democratic voters if we had more elected officials on the convention floor to offset the more liberal impulses of party activists."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10devine.html

If the voters pick the more liberal candidate, shouldn't that read "to offset the more liberal impulses of voters"?

[formernaderite]

10. the other problem is that the voting public

has NO idea who these delegates are they are voting for to represent them...it's kind of a potluck vote. I do actually take the time to look up their profiles...but often they are completely unknown entities...or party hacks.

[noamnety]

13. I saw one of these guys interviewed tonight on the news

(or what passes for the news, anyway)

It was unbelievable. He never talked about any issues, he just talked about all the calls he was getting from Bill Clinton, from Kerry, from Chelsea, etc. trying to influence his vote.

And he refused to say who he was voting for, or even leaning toward. It was like that election in Iraq that was supposed to be the big shift to democracy, when you could "vote" but you weren't allowed to know who you were voting for.

"The national ballot will have a line with the name, number and symbol, if there is one, for each of 111 slates of candidates. But the names of the individual candidates that make up each slate will not be on the ballot, the specialists said."