The End of Democracy?

Here is an interesting thought to ponder, right now Barack Obama has 1610 pledged delegates and Hilary Clinton has 1443 and the DNC requires 2025 delegates for a candidate to win the nomination. Left on the table are the following states, 5/20 Kentucky (51) and Oregon (52), 6/01 Puerto Rico (55), 6/03 South Dakota (15) and Montana (16). Which according to my calculations means there are only 189 voter delegates left, it's not going to happen, but giving all the delegates to either of the candidates results in: Obama 1799 or Clinton 1632, both short of the 2025 required to win the nomination.

What does this all mean? What it means is that the Democratic nomination for the President of the United States will be determined by some combination of the 795 super-delegates created by the party. That means that the Democratic nominee will be chosen by 19 Distinguished Party Leaders, 31 Democratic Governors, 48 Members of the Senate, 223 Members of the House, 398 Democratic National Committee members, and the 76 unpledged add-ons (usually party state chairs, etc).

The problem in this entire scenario is that the super-delegates, created by the party, are unpledged... meaning they may vote their conscience and do not have to follow the will of the people. The problem is that the people get 3253 and the party gets 795, that works out to approximately a 75/25 percent split, so 795 people get 25 percent of the say in who the next presidential party candidate is. Not exactly what I think our founding fathers intended when they established this Federal Republic of ours.

What is the worst case scenario here? Obama gets the popular vote and Clinton gets the nomination (Don't think it can't happen... the Clinton's have a lot of friends in the DNC, and simply because an unpledged delgate declares for a candidate doesn't mean they have to vote for them come convention time). As of right now Obama has 303 and Clinton has 278 'pledged' super-delegates. All this comes down to is a very interesting convention this August in Denver.

It means, that no matter what, the Democratic nominee is going to be the result of back-door political politics, decided not by the people but by party officials.

Only time shall tell where we go from there.

~Finntann~