So, you say you're the party of the people
Either Oregon really is a serious player in this year's presidential primaries, or Barack Obama and Bill Clinton just happened to be in the neighborhood over the last two weekends and thought they'd drop by and say hello.
When 22 states clustered together last year and scheduled Super Tuesday for early February, no one in the nation predicted political frolics like this in late March for the Rogue Valley.
Clinton touched down in Medford midway through what you could call his Chill Out Tour. With calls for his wife to end her candidacy so the Democratic Party could unify, the former President told a California crowd, "Don't let anybody tell you that somehow we are weakening the Democratic Party. Chill out and let everybody have their say. We are going to win this election."
"Anybody" meant the growing number of Democratic heavyweights urging Hillary Clinton to fold her tent so the party can rally behind a single candidate. Here's the part that won't amaze you: those calling for unification behind the current frontrunner are Obama supporters, while those saying everyone should vote before anyone is chosen are Clinton supporters.
This is one of many situations that reminds me of baseball. Major league baseball has a rule that says if bad weather forces a game to end, it has to be continued or replayed at a later date unless five full innings have been played. In that case, the team that was ahead at the completion of the last full inning is declared the winner. I remember my fierce opinion about this rule as I grew up in Los Angeles with a serious Dodgers obsession. Opinions, plural, actually. If a game was rained out after five innings when the Dodgers were leading, it was a completely sensible rule, the only fair way to do it, really. If the Dodgers were trailing in a late inning rain-out, the stupid rule was a blot on the honor of the game.
The only late inning rally that would change the outcome of this game would be a rush of superdelegates — elected Democrats and appointed party officials — to Hillary Clinton. The unexpected clamor over superdelegates this year sounds like yet another example of the old adage that where you stand depends on where you sit: they represent either an orderly way to infuse the nominating process with important inside experience, or a glorified relic of smoke-filled rooms where the bosses call the shots. But even the most nimble of Hillary supporters can't get around the core message of the superdelegate format: there is an elite that knows what's best for the party, the country, for all of us — better than we do.
Superdelegates might counter by saying they don't necessarily know what's better for us, but they know who's most electable. They are, after all, politics' pros, and we're not. A lot of this attitude comes from the 1972 election, when revulsion for the Vietnam War swamped the party establishment and carried South Dakota Senator George McGovern to the nomination. Richard Nixon's landslide that year convinced party leaders that the grownups had to grab the reins to head off the selection of "unelectable" candidates.
The assessment of electability by certified-smart Democratic leaders has moved America steadily to the political right. What we get are presidential match-ups between centrist Democrats and (mostly) doctrinaire Republicans, with progressive voices pretty much limited to protest signs out on the sidewalk.
We've paid a heavy price for this "realism."
Presidential campaigns — our quadrennial opportunity for a national conversation about who we are and where we want to go — end up spanning the range of possible options from A to C. Genuinely creative ideas on health care, trade, military spending, economic relocalization, renewable energy, drug and criminal justice policies haven't made the cut, which explains both the depth of the holes we're in and the certainty of millions of Americans that politics has nothing to do with them.
What will the superdelegates do this unusual year? We'll see. If they serve the originally-intended purpose, making sure that the boat rocks only slightly so that those in the expensive seats don't fall out, they'll almost certainly snuff out the embers of political renewal. Anyone who says that's a price that might have to be paid for victory should probably reflect a little harder on 2000 and 2004, two years when it looked like a talented cocker spaniel with a "D" after its name would be able to take the White House. Both Democratic campaigns gave up the chance to fire up millions of marginal or dropped-out voters in order to fight for the last 143 supposedly undecided — but "likely" — voters in America.
The superdelegates might set that same process into motion for the third time. Memo to Democrat leadership: HERE IS YOUR PROBLEM. It's hard to take seriously your claim to be the "Party of the People" when you're afraid of the people.
Jeff Golden is the author of "As If We Were Grownups," "Forest Blood" and the new novel "Unafraid." (www.unafraidthebook.com).
