Is It a Bird? Is It a Plane? No, It’s the Machine Again

Faster than a speeding pork barrel, more powerful than executive privilege, able to leap tall ballot boxes in a single bound. There in the sky, is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Superdelegate!

Now that the contest for the Democratic nomination is intensifying we see the term “superdelegate” popping up more and more in the media, but I have yet to see an explanation of how some of the Democratic Convention delegates became “super.” It seems that there are delegates and delegates and that some of them are more equal than others, and not precisely because they eat more spinach.

First stop, the Wikipedia: “’Superdelegate’ is an informal term for some of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention, the quadrennial convention of the United States Democratic Party.” According to the online encyclopedia, the superdelegates are not elected in primary elections nor party caucuses, but are delegates ex-oficio by virtue of being Democratic incumbents or ex office holders. They are what the Democratic Convention website refers to as “unpledged and pledged party leaders and elected official delegates,” whatever that means. We shall refer to them here as “The Team from the Machine.” There are 796 of them, making up roughly 20% of the total number of delegates to the Democratic Convention.