Bernie Sanders
Related: About this forumThe (un)Democratic Party (New York Times editorial)
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/opinion/the-un-democratic-party.htmlAutumn
(45,120 posts)Bernin4U
(812 posts)If you can access, maybe post a snippet?
Voice for Peace
(13,141 posts)I accessed through the Opinion link at the site:
Charles M. Blow
There are two prominent features of the Democratic Partys presidential selection process that are thoroughly undemocratic and undermine faith in the party: superdelegates (which favor Hillary Clinton) and caucuses (which favor Bernie Sanders).
As the New York Times editorial board explained: Superdelegates are party bigwigs 712 Democratic leaders, legislators, governors and the like. They can vote for any candidate at the nominating convention, regardless of whether that candidate won the popular vote. These unpledged delegates make up 30 percent of the 2,382 delegates whose votes are needed to win the nomination, and could thus make all the difference.
Lets start there. Superdelegates, whose votes are not bound by the millions of individual voters, make up nearly a third of the delegates that would be required to win the nomination. That, on its face, is outrageous.
Its no surprise that superdelegates were created by establishment elites to increase their own power. Superdelegates were invented by a Democratic rule change in the early 1980s after the nomination of George McGovern in 1972 and the devastating loss of Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan in 1980, precisely to help the establishment prevent the nomination of insurgent candidates of whom the establishment disapproved. (Sanders is nothing if not an insurgent candidate.)