The NY Times today published an Op-Ed today titled “Got a Problem? Ask the Super”.  Written by Geraldine Ferraro, a respected former party elder who Walter Mondale plucked from the House of Representatives to fill the Vice Presidential slot on the 1984 Democrat ticket, I approached the piece with the expectation of getting a fresh perspective on how the Democratic party can work through the unresolved issue over how the Super Delegates should play a role in the 2008 nominating contest.  In 1984, the first election in which I was old enough to vote, I was prepared to cast my vote for Gary Hart in the primary.  But by the time the primary season reached Illinois, Walter Mondale was the “frontrunner” and it was clear to anyone following the race that Mondale was the pick of the Democratic establishment and that he would be the party’s nominee.  As a fervent ant-Reganite I felt obliged to be the good Democrat and support the Party’s choice.  I held my nose and voted for Mondale in the primary, the presumptive nominee. 

There was a strong sense at the time that no one could defeat Reagan in the fall, no matter who the Democrats ran, so I was pleased when Mondale and the Party made the unconventional and risky choice of placing a woman on the ticket in the number two spot.  Ferraro had not run in the primaries, but she was impressive in the campaign and I was frankly more excited by her in the race than by Mondale.  We all know the rest of the story, at least how it ended in November of ’84.

Younger voters may only know Ferraro as a name from Democratic Party trivia, which is understandable since she resigned her House before the 1984 general election and, after losing with Mondale, was unsuccessful in two subsequent bids for a Senate seat.  But I’ve remembered her fondly as the first female candidate ever to run on a major party’s presidential ticket.  I guess I can be forgiven for the positive attitude with which I looked forward to reading the NY Time Op-Ed.

I had no idea that Ferraro played a role in setting up the Super Delegates in 1982 and was anxious to read a first-hand account of the reasoning behind the Party’s decision to add a rather undemocratic wrinkle to the Democratic nominating process.  But Ferraro’s account of the Hunt Commission’s work in 1982 shed little light on why the Super Delegates were given their role in the nominating process.  Instead, this Op-Ed reads like a press release for the Clinton campaign, an extended self-contradictory agglomeration of spin in the service of the Clinton’s campaign’s views on this primary season.  As an Obama supporter I found Ferraro’s piece disconcerting and very disappointing, having hoped for a more neutral and balanced disquisition.  Sadly, after years on the sidelines, Ferraro is using her faded brand name to replay the role of Party establishment hack.

Ferraro suggests that because of infighting at the 1980 convention, “members of Congress who were concerned about their re-election walked away from the president and from the party.”  She mentions her role in the Hunt Commission which created the Super Delegates, but she does not explain how infighting over the Party platform related to giving the Super Delegates their role as electors at the convention.  In what I assume was meant as elucidation, Ferraro continued, “Democrats had to figure out a way to unify our party. What better way, we reasoned, than to get elected officials involved in writing the platform, sitting on the credentials committee and helping to write the rules that the party would play by?”

If the problem was that elected officials were not given a voice at the convention, to contribute to Party rule-making or in creating the Party platform, the Party could simply provide Party members more rights on committees at the convention.  Why go the extra step of giving those “delegates” the power to cast 20% of the votes in the selection of the Party’s nominee?

“These superdelegates, we reasoned, are the party’s leaders. They are the ones who can bring together the most liberal members of our party with the most conservative and reach accommodation.”

All well and good.  Create a broader base of party interests in creating the party platform.  But why change the actual voting process for the Party’s nomination?   Ferraro moves on without answering the key question: why did the party create a new voting bloc not tied to the primary process?

Noting this season’s conflicts over the role of the Super Delegates, Ferraro says “the superdelegates were created to lead, not to follow. They were, and are, expected to determine what is best for our party and best for the country. I would hope that is why many superdelegates have already chosen a candidate to support.”

Why would the Super Delegates “have already chosen” a candidate?  What in the Party’s thinking process back in 1982 would bring us to that conclusion?  Ferraro doesn’t say.   As it stands, a plurality of the Super Delegates have not yet committed to a candidate, so it’s a moot point suggesting that they should already have done so.  And to what end?  How could the Super Delegates know what is best for the country before the campaign and primary elections took place?  The primary season is an excellent vehicle in which to learn about the candidates and to gauge who rank and file Democrats are willing to support and elect in the general campaign.  The only way I can read Ferraro’s suggestion is in light of her support for Clinton, whose strength in the polls early on and whose “inevitable” status in the eyes of the Party establishment make the primaries and caucuses a moot point to the Super Delegates.  Decide early and decide for the voters who will be the nominee.  This strikes me as particularly arrogant and altogether undemocratic.

Ferraro’s next line of argument is even more reprehensible.  She argues that the voters in the primary process are not representative of the Democratic electorate.  After all, only 30% of voters participate in the primaries.  Following that line of reasoning, perhaps we shouldn’t have any primaries at all.  And while we’re at it, given the apathy of American voters every 4 years as we select a president, let’s dispense with elections altogether!   Ferraro’s argument is in complete denial of modern reality.  We have a process that allows all American to participate in shaping our parties and selecting who we feel will make the best president.  The voters have come out this year and turned against the Party’s establishment pick, so the establishment is now arguing that it’s better for the insiders to predetermine the candidate than allow that pesky 30% of us to have its say.

How voter turnout justifies the existence of Super Delegates is beyond me.  But there’s more cynical insight to come in Ferraro’s discourse.  She tells us that “many states like New York have closed primaries in which only enrolled Democrats are allowed to vote, [and] in many other states Republicans and independents can make the difference by voting in Democratic primaries or caucuses.”  Indeed, and this is certainly something to consider when making Party rules.  And when Ferraro had an opportunity to participate in making those rules, did she support a mandate for closed primaries?  And is giving the Party establishment a piece of the action in the nominating process really the best solution to this issue?  Let’s face it: all the Democratic candidates were faced with the same electoral conditions when the race began.  It’s absolutely disingenuous to now make arguments about how the Super Delegates should act because the existing rules have given an edge to one of the candidates.  All the candidates had an opportunity to leverage the rules when the game began; only one of the candidates succeeded. 

Adding insult to injury, Ferraro weighs in on what the candidates’ supporters are saying about the process: “Perhaps because I have endorsed Mrs. Clinton, I have noticed that most of the people complaining about the influence of the superdelegates are supporters of Mr. Obama. I can’t help thinking that their problem with the superdelegates may not be that they’re ‘unrepresentative,’ but rather that they are perceived as disproportionately likely to support Mrs. Clinton.”

The Super Delegates were only likely to disproportionately support Clinton when she was the Party’s establishment pick, before the elections began.  Only after the campaign played out could the Party make an informed decision over which candidate was better positioned to win a general election. To even suggest that the Super Delegates should have disproportionately supported anyone is more arrogance and presumption.  As an Obama supporter I have not had an expectation that the Super Delegates would be supporting anyone before the primaries, and thought the Super Delegates shouldn’t express a preference for one candidate or the other until the voters showed a strong preference one way or the other.  If that preference were for Clinton, then a Super Delegate’s support for Clinton would be justified.

It makes no sense for the Party insiders to speak out in support of one candidate before any primary votes are cast.  Do we really want a candidate to have a 20% leg up before the voting begins?  If that were the case, no candidate would bother with seeking endorsements by party officials. What official would endorse a candidate for whom they’ve already committed to vote against at the convention?

After making a case that Democratic voters are irrelevant to choosing a candidate, Ferraro pivots to making the case for seating the Florida and Michigan delegations. Ferraro doesn’t provide a reason for connecting the Super Delegate and FL/MI issues, but as it’s apparent by this point in the article that she is shilling for the Clinton campaign, she may as well put in her two cents on the other democracy issue at hand.  And is Ferraro concerned about party rules and how important it is for a broad coalition of Democrats to legitimize Party decisions?  Weren’t the Super Delegates created so more Party members had a say on DNC committees and the party platform?  Wouldn’t those voices be disenfranchised by failing to enforce the rules they created?  But it’s convenient now for the Clinton campaign to do just that.  Rules be damned, that 30% of the electorate that doesn’t matter anyway needs to be represented at the convention!  On the one hand, Ferraro argues that voter participation is so low that the Party needs a super force to back up the Party’s will, while on the other she thinks the Florida and Michigan voters are indispensable to making a democratic decision.

I’m saddened that Ms. Ferraro has not understood what the Democratic electorate has been saying in this election.  We want a fair, open, democratic process, and we are not happy with the Party establishment and its effort to perpetuate its own interests to the detriment of the democratic process.  If Ferraro is truly concerned about Democratic turnout, she and her fellow establishment hacks would do well to not use arrogant and undemocratic reasoning in an effort to change the results of elections in which Democrats are voicing their preference for who they want to see as our next president. 

I wish I had read an Op-Ed piece like this by the Geraldine Ferraro in 1984.  I would have been far less likely to support the Democratic frontrunner for the sake of party unity if I understood the establishment’s jaded approach to prearranging the Democratic nomination and scorning the very voters who make up the Democratic constituency.