Dispelling The Obama Moose Poop About Super Delegates
By Uppity Woman on April 2, 2008 at 11:21 PM in Barack Obama, Current Affairs, DNC, George McGovern, Superdelegates
What a stroke of luck!
I found a recent interview with George McGovern, the man who went down in history as one of the biggest Presidential election losers in history. George, you see, was loved, revered, worshipped by every child in America. He was like a Rock Star! Sound familiar?
Everyone who turned 18 that year couldn’t wait to vote for this man who was so progressive (for the time), they would have attached a bungie cord to him today just to make sure he didn’t fall off the left cliff. They worked their hearts out for George, yes they did! It was their source of entertainment for nearly a whole year! I was a little puppy at the time, and I simply was in LOVE with George. My parents on the other hand weren’t so impressed with the rallies and the behaviors of busloads of rowdy kids. Now does it sound familiar?
There was one little problem with this though. The mainstream, as in the majority of Democrats, disagreed with him and their young dependents. These were people like, you know, people who worked for a living, paid taxes, and boring stuff like that. So in practice, McGovern was the man who was ultimately the inspiration for Super Delegates. I’m sure you can now see where this is going.
So now it is time for everyone to understand the true purpose of Super Delegates. Mostly their job is to avoid another George McGovern train wreck. Does this at least sound familiar now? Just asking.
The idea here was to make sure that, as a minimum, people who are barely housebroken and who are rather …um…scant on life experience (not to mention scant in the taxpaying department) and judgment/wisdom didn’t pick any more presidential candidates all by their little selves – at least not until their beards grew in completely and they had reached their adult height. The idea here was that it’s kind of nice really to allow people who know something besides which rappers are the coolest to help pick the most powerful person in the world.
The party leaders realized after McGovern that young people are very prone to razzle dazzle and idealism. Substance seems to escape them if the rock concert is a good one, like, you know? I mean, without a little wisdom in the mix, we could have a real inept dork or a Pied Piper con artist as a candidate, you know what I mean?
Now does this sound familiar?
How about this quote from an Obama fan to help you along:
“There’s just this amazing excitement that’s here,” she said. “When he was talking about hope, it actually almost made me cry. Like it really made sense, like, for the first, like, whoa … how important a time this is for us. It was really exciting.”
–20 year old at an Obama Religious Experience Rally.
Like Whoa….
Now you know why Super Delegates exist. Too bad they are all afraid of getting beaten up if they do their jobs.
Anyways, here’s a link to an interview with our main Presidential election loser of all time. selected zealously by our adoring American youth: George McGovern. I should go easier on him though. He was a lovable progressive curr, I’ll give him that. He was an all-right guy, just a little over the edge of the mainstream is all. His followers, though, were Like Whoa.
The kids adored George McGovern. His 18 year old delegates were hooting and hollering all over the convention floor, let me tell you. And George was Our- Man-Dammit-And-Don’t-You-Mess-With- Us! If they had the technology then you might have seen George’s face on this sacrilegious poster. Like Whoa.
Unfortunately, enough Democrats didn’t subscribe to Like Whoa enough to vote for George. Richard Nixon (sputter!) kicked George McGovern’s butt onto the next continent because, even next to Dick, he was out of touch with the mainstream. They felt his anti-war platform was too “radical” in the way it was handled. It scared them more than the war did. George deserves love just for that race though. Who among us could feel good about ourselves after losing to Richard Nixon? God, how awful. It must have been kind of like the thought of losing to John McCain. Like Whoa!
Here are some highlights from the interview that might ring a bit of a bell today:
GEORGE McGOVERN: No, the superdelegates were not part of the McGovern reforms, but they were a concession some years later to the party regulars who thought that certain people should automatically be delegates. If you were the governor of a state, if you were a United States senator, if you were the state chairperson, you should automatically be a delegate, up to a percentage of one-fourth of the total number of delegates. There always had to be three-fourths of the delegates going to the national convention who were elected according to our reform rules, but we made that one concession.
I think one of the things that produced it—we discovered in ’72, for example, that a nineteen-year-old McGovern young woman defeated Tip O’Neill in his home district of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Well, Tip O’Neill should have been at the Democratic National Convention. Averell Harriman, running in New York, was defeated by another young person, a McGovern delegate.
(Now does this all sound familiar?)
AMY GOODMAN: And what’s wrong with this?
GEORGE McGOVERN: Nothing wrong with it, but we thought maybe as a concession to age and wisdom and stature. and all of that business, that we should make a one-fourth concession. So we said one-fourth of the concession can be what we now call superdelegates
AMY GOODMAN: Some say perhaps the superdelegates were chosen in reaction to 1972, your bid, and Carter’s bid, as well, that maybe the establishment did not favor you and wanted more of a say, sort of like the House of Commons versus the House of Lords.
GEORGE McGOVERN: Not only some say that, that’s absolutely the truth. It was a reaction to what they thought were candidates picked by young people, antiwar people, crusaders, and that the people that work at politics 365 days out of the year, like a senator or a congressman or a governor, were not making it to the conventions. So I want to confess that I supported that concession. I thought it was something we could live with. And so far, it hasn’t done any damage.
So next time you hear Barack Obama or one of his swooning fans tell you that Super Delegates must go with the “popular vote” or the “delegates,” or whatever he is ahead with that suits him at the moment, please remind him that he is full of crap. Their job is to do their job. Overall I would say that, in this case, their job is to avoid Barack McGovern from being the next embarrassment for the Democratic Party on Election Day.
Originally posted at Hyper Educated Uppity Woman
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