The Rules of the Game

Chris Bowers is outraged by the prospect of superdelegates determining the winner of the Democratic primary. Kevin Drum is blasé. I'll take a middle ground view -- I think Chris is right to think it'd be a pretty bitter pill to swallow if that's how things shake out, but the controlling principle here is that "the rules are the rules." The superdelegates business, which seems to favor Clinton, is just the flipside of things like the Michigan/Florida exclusion or the weird rules that let Obama win Nevada even while Clinton had many more votes -- there's a lot of oddness in the nominating system and there's no point of plucking out any particular feature and slamming it as unfair as the process unfolds.

Conversely, this stuff gets tweaked every cycle. The Democrats have had this dumb superdelegate thing in there for a couple of decades now with people mostly not focusing on it because it never comes into play. Well, now it might come into play and it doesn't sit well with people. They ought to ditch the rule going forward.