dogtown commons

We’re hearing a lot about the 796 Democratic Party superdelegates these days, since it is possible that they will end up acting as a kind of tiebreaker. Assuming that neither Clinton nor Obama will be dominant enough in upcoming contests to win the nomination on elected (or “pledged”) delegates alone, the nomination will come down to the superdelegates. They may end up deciding to back whichever candidate has more pledged delegates, in order to foster party unity and follow the “will of the voters,” but it is also possible that they will end up choosing a nominee who actually had fewer pledged delegates than another candidate.

So who are these 796 superdelegates, who have the potential to choose the Democratic Party nominee? Well, all Democratic members of Congress are superdelegates, as well as all former Democratic presidents (i.e., Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the only surviving Democratic presidents). Others are party officials, either in the Democratic National Committee or at the state level. One sometimes hears superdelegates referred to as “party elders,” which conjures up an image of wise and impartial guiding hands.

If that is your impression, then think again — ABC News introduces us to one superdelegate, Jason Rae of Wisconsin, who was being courted by Chelsea Clinton over breakfast this morning:

Rae may be a typical college junior but he is certainly not the typical DNC super delegate.

He is only 21 years old — he has never voted in a presidential election because he turned 18 after Election Day in 2004.

Since the race between New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama is so tight, Rae has become a power broker of sorts, as both campaigns push hard to lock down the support of super delegates.

Rae said he and Chelsea Clinton talked about electability and mobilizing young people to get involved in politics. He said she spoke about what states her mother can carry in the general election and what demographics favor her candidacy. The two talked about how the campaign’s operations were going in the states and what she is seeing on the ground.

The breakfast lasted about 30 minutes. Rae said he had to hustle back to campus and get to his afternoon classes.

Rae was elected as a DNC member at the Wisconsin state party convention in June 2004. He was 17 years old at the time but there are no party rules that say a DNC member has to be of voting age. Rae ran against and defeated the president of the state firefighters’ union and a state legislator.

Rae has been called on his cell phone by former President Clinton and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who tried to woo him to the Clinton side and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who was pushing for Rae to endorse Obama.

Rae is presumably an extreme case. One assumes that almost every other superdelegate has voted in a Presidential election at least once in his or her life, but this is just one more example of the disturbing things you discover when you start overturning rocks in our fine democracy. Most elections are won by a wide margin, so we don’t have occasion to inspect the nuts and bolts of the process very closely.

Then something like the 2000 election happens, and suddenly you realize that someone really can win more votes than the other guy and still lose the election, or that a Presidential election can hang on hanging chads in a handful of counties in Florida. The same is true of the party nomination systems — in most cases, one candidate ends up running away with the nomination, so we don’t need to worry about whether a low-turnout caucus is really representative of the will of that state’s Democratic Party electorate, or whether superdelegates should really account for more than 15 percent of the decisive votes at a nominating convention.

As with so many things, the more you learn about how the sausage gets made, the less appetite you have for it.