Last Friday, I was forwarded the email and accompanying letter that was sent out to some super delegates in Virginia, urging them to support Barack Obama. I decided to ignore it. But now that it’s out there, let me add my two cents.
First of all, it seems that these so-called “leaders” want to circumvent the system that the party has in place. Let me remind you: the superdelegates are not rubber-stamps for the public vote. To say otherwise is to ignore the reason why they exist. Don’t go trying to change the rules in the middle of the game.
Second, I would love to know how many of those chairs polled their membership before using those titles to speak on their behalf. Or are they, in fact, speaking for themselves? I think it’s probably the latter.
(Oh – and those chairs from the 9th – how about the fact that Hillary won your CD? Are you intending to ask your SD to vote for her? After all, that’s the will of the people, right?)
Finally, a big shout out to Jim Webb for recognizing the purpose of the superdelegates.
Uncommitted superdelegate Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., said this morning that superdelegates should be able to overturn the will of the people. “If they didn’t want the superdelegates to have independent judgment, they wouldn’t have created them,” Webb said in an exclusive “This Week” interview.
I was watching his interview and thought that maybe, just maybe, all of those folks who wholeheartedly supported his candidacy might pick up on his stance on this issue and make it their own.
Naw. That would be too hard.
Anyway – to the Virginia SDs – I urge you to do what you think is best.
UPDATE: Here’s what SD Susan Swecker has to say on the matter:
Dear Peter and Scott,
I received your thoughtful letter by email on Saturday afternoon and came home this evening to write a response.
I was surprised that I was not given the courtesy to respond to you before it was posted sometime today on Raising Kaine.
Rest assured that I take my responsibility as an automatic delegate very seriously and it is something that I think about every day. Once it became apparent that we were going to be in this nomination period for a much longer time than anticipated (sometime after the NH primary) I did some extensive research on the role of “superdelegates”, how they came to be in existence and what is expected of them.
Senator Jim Webb is correct when he said on This Week with George Stephanopolus yesterday that if the national party “didn’t want superdelegates to have independent judgment they wouldn’t have created them”. That is why they were created by the Hunt Commission (headed by former Governor Jim Hunt of NC) in 1982 and why they still exist today. As I see my role, it is to support the candidate who I believe, using my best judgment, will make the strongest commander in chief and get our economy at home back on track. In my opinion, that is Senator Hillary Clinton.
There is nothing – anywhere – that remotely indicates that the superdelegate should follow the will of the democratic voters of that state. However, if that is your premise, then please encourage Congressman Rick Boucher (whose 9th Congressional District went overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton) to switch his support from Obama to Clinton. And please encourage Senators Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Governors DuVal Patrick, Bill Richardson, Janet Napalitano….. the list goes on ….. to do the same.
With all due respect, I have done my national Democratic math as well. To date, more than 27 million Americans have cast a ballot for Senators Clinton and Obama.
Of that 27 million, less than 1% separate the two Democrats in the 2008 campaign for the White House. (if the roles were reversed and Senator Obama was behind by less than 1%, you would not expect the race to be over).
By my count, Senator Obama leads with 130 delegates, but 887 delegates still remain to be committed to any candidate.
What is wrong with making sure that states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana and others to have a chance to say who they want for their nominee.
And making sure that Florida and Michigan are resolved fairly? Lord only knows we don’t need to disenfranchise any more Florida voters!
I believe this race is good for our Party; at least for right now. States that have never participated before are getting a chance to have their say and we are getting to know who our voters are. This is a good roadmap for victory not only for this year – but to build the Party in the years to come. If you don’t believe me, ask Governor Kaine how important he felt the 2004 Presidential Primary was to his gubernatorial victory in 2005.
I do hear your concerns about the race going into August. I do believe it will be and should be decided by then. But I feel just as strongly that the rest of the states need to vote and Florida and Michigan need to be resolved fairly – and then focus turns to the superdelegates. I hope that we as a group and individually will be able to bring this nomination process to a close and begin the process of uniting behind our nominee. While we may now differ on who that nominee should be, I will tell you that I will be the first Virginia Democrat to sign up for Obama for President if he is the nominee.
I will continue to listen to Virginians and continue to closely follow this historical competitive race.
Best
Susan
Yeah. What she said.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
I’m pretty sick of all of this.
I wish that Virginia Democrats were getting just as fired up about local campaigns.
Like Glenn Nye in the 2nd! The primary has been over in VA for a few months, yet everyone is still obsessed. Let’s put energy to making real change in our own districts!
As for the Superdelegates.I think we all need to respect the opinions of ALL the Superdelegates. Period.
Vivian:
Some people seem to be misreading our letter. We agree with you, Susan, Mame, and Senator Webb that superdelegates should exercise their independent judgment. Our letter provided a whole series of factors that they ought to take into account. Although Obama’s popular vote victory in Virginia was one of those factors, by itself it isn’t the one that is most important to us.
Many of us from around the state saw something amazing happen in Virginia’s primary.
– We had hundreds of people show up at Fairfax County’s high-performance, low-turnout precincts on primary day looking **to register** to vote.
– We saw more volunteers out and more doors knocked in a primary than anyone can ever remember.
– We’ve seen scores of new people looking to get involved in the party – WAY more than usual in a Presidential cycle.
This is unprecedented and it was seen across the Commonwealth.
Our point and what the letter said was that given what all of us have seen in our committees, undermining the will of the people IN THIS ELECTION, would be unduly destructive of the Party and our base.
The people who signed this letters are committee chairs. They have committees to run. We have signs and stickers to order, literature to design, and campaigns to plan. Fairfax County by itself is larger than 8 states with 1,000,000 people. We can’t wait until September 1 to find out who our nominee is going to be and September 30 for the stickers and signs to be printed and arrive. We need some finality now.
If it were numerically possible for Sen. Clinton to win the delegates of the popular vote count at this point, we might feel differently, but at this point, many of us view spending another $100,000,000 fighting each other instead of focusing those kinds of resources on John McCain is the equivalent of political suicide.
I like your blog by the way. Keep up the good work and you frequently post thoughtful articles.
Scott – the “will of the people” is reflected in the pledged delegate allocation. To say that the SDs have to bend to the “will of the people” when that is not the way the rules were set up is, in my opinion, a bogus argument.
Obama gets 54 pledged delegates and Clinton gets 29. If we truly use the “will of the people” argument, then should not our SDs be allocated on the same percentage?
Susan Swecker’s an incredibly intelligent woman, and I’m not just saying that because she brought up the same point about the significance of high primary participation that I wrote to you on election day, Vivian. 🙂
I’m a Democrat and an Obama supporter, and like a lot of folks I’m well into Primary fatigue. However, well I’m sure that this petition and letter is largely well intentioned, I can’t help but feel that some aspects of it are disingenous, and many more are dangerously misinformed.
This close primary is good for the party. Mr. Surovell already pointed out how it was good for Fairfax (it will be good for Pennsylvania the same way, just as it was good for Ohio and Colorado and Missouri and all the other potential battlegrounds this November). It’s also raised Democratic fundraising performance to unthinkable levels. Mr. Surovell has expressed the view that spending $100m on a primary is “political suicide.” Respectfully, I’d point out that the fact that we even *have* $100m to spend on *anything* is an unbelievable, beneficial direct consequence of this close primary. New small-dollar donors are pouring out of the woodwork to give money to my candidate of choice because they know he needs the money right now, and they’re going to continue giving money as long as he needs it. Between the end of the primary contest and the convention, though, the tap’s going to run dry; so let’s keep it on, shall we?
Rather than pressuring super delegates to do this, that or the other, I’d like to ask EVERYONE to get over yourselves. Quit with the egos. People are taking the situation way too personally, are taking themselves way too seriously, and generally are overreacting to a situation that is actually not nearly as bad as folks seem to think.
(By the way, Ms. Swecker, if you do happen to read this, I still hope you’ll vote to support the candidacy of Barack Obama.)
Anonymous-
Excellent post. You nailed it right on the head.
Excellent post; and yeah, Webb makes me proud to be a Virginian with a big “D.”
Very well put anonymous 1:16. I think your point that the primaries have been beneficial and have actually built the party is well taken.
I know Scott Surovell and I think he honestly has the good of the party at heart. He’s a good person. But I disagree with his line of reasoning.
As he said, he saw something incredible happen across Virginia, especially in Fairfax precincts, where the turnout was the highest ever. New people have gotten involved as never before, especially young people.
But the same can and needs to happen in the remaining states. Just as this is the first time Virginia’s vote has truly counted, the same will be true in other states holding primaries. This is a great chance for them to register new voters, get more volunteers, increase their voter turnout, and build their local party infrastructure.
So, a letter attempting to convince Virginia’s super delegates to all commit to Obama as a method of convincing Hillary to drop out before the process has run its course takes on an unseemly and inappropriate appearance.
As I said, Scott, and his fellow author, Peter Rousselot, has the best interests of the party at heart. But democracy – and the Democratic Party – is best served by letting democracy takes its course by completing the rest of the primaries and giving all states a chance to vote.
Is this sort of hackish chicanery what we are to expect from Sen. Transformational Candidate? The longer this campaign goes on, the more he looks like a typical pol – anything to win.
hey Scott: you should do YOU MATH correctly before you sent out that letter, if you think this should apply in every state, the superdelegates reflecting the vote of the state’s vote, then Hillary would be way ahead in this thing, be careful what you ask for, oh, that’s right, you only want Virginia’s superdelegates to vote this way…….talking about dividing a party, I give you and your group of signatures high marks for dividing the Virginia Democratic Party AFTER the primary! Shame on all of you.
Actually, I agree with both sides. The superdelegates should vote as they wish, and the constituents can apply pressure to them as they wish.
It’s called Democracy. People are holding back on both sides for their own reasons.
Let it play out.
Who thought that Va would be in play and bring out almost a million people for a PRIMARY.
I think they call it the fifty state stategy.
Oddly enough, the “Democratic” Party is NOT democratic in its selection of candidate for president.
Anon, what would be democratic to you? The rules were made by the reps to the DNC.
They voted on them, so they are the rules. Just cause they aren’t the rules you want, they are the rules that they go by.
I did not say whether I liked the rules or not — I only said they were not democratic.
Do you disagree?