Super----

I will entitle this blog entry as ‘super’ days. After Sunday’s ‘SUPER’ bowl, there was yesterday’s ‘SUPER’ Tuesday.
Granted I don’t what is so “super” about football, or political primaries, but apparently they are just ‘super’.
For me Sunday night and Tuesday evening just left me in a ‘stupor’. (Pun, attended-)

So I live in Ohio, the land of…where politics can boil down to this statement; the Ohio House of Representatives passed a law that would have declared the tomato to be the official state fruit, but the bill died when the Ohio Senate failed to act on it.

Ok. Granted Ohio, is an important state politically. But after four years of trying to find a Political Job in OHIO, I am left to question where everyone is? Ohio, can make the final vote, such as in the election of 2004. And it just might play an important part on who is the democratic nominee.
But it seems that the people of Ohio are some what forgotten. Maybe this is just my obscured opinion?

Also in my observation the whole Delegate system, doesn’t make any sense what so ever. And yes, I attended for years of a Political Science degree.

For instance:

· Eighty percent of the 4,050 Democratic Party delegates will arrive at the convention having already been pledged to a specific candidate during the primaries and caucuses. The number of delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination is 2,025. The Democratic Party system was designed to be proportional, which could lead to Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY) ending up with “roughly similar numbers,” says Peter Beinart, CFR’s senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy. “Even the way it’s done proportionally tends to lead to parity, in the sense that the threshold you need to get delegates is fairly low.”
Any Democratic candidate receiving at least 15 percent of the vote in a given primary or caucus is entitled to a proportional number of delegates from that state. When John Edwards dropped out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in January 2008, some speculated he might use the delegates he won in early primaries and caucuses to become a power broker of sorts at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008. “[W]ith a chunk of delegates, you can leverage what you’ve been fighting for and standing for. You can raise these issues to where they should be on the Democratic agenda,” David Bonior, Edwards’ national campaign manager told the New York Times.

Meaning if you get 15% of the vote you get that many delegates, right? Thus if you won in NY with 63%, and the other candidate had 41% of the vote, they get 41% of the delegates right?
So if you are a delegate in the democratic party, you are based on proportional votes, and not the winner take all system in which many of the states have in the republican party.

Yeah, and then there are super delegates- yeah super delegates, like Bill Clinton is a super delegate for the Democratic Party.

· The Democratic Party has superdelegates, which include elected officials, like members of Congress, and party officials. At the Democratic convention, superdelegates account for twenty percent of overall delegates and are “uncommitted and are not bound in any fashion” to any one candidate, says Ornstein. In other words, they can throw their support to whomever they want at the convention.
The Democratic nomination process was altered to include superdelegates in 1984. That year, former Vice President Walter Mondale won the Democratic nomination with strong support from party stalwarts. Some experts say Democratic candidate George McGovern’s landslide 1972 loss to Richard Nixon influenced the party’s introduction of superdelegates. “There was a view that the Democratic party had allowed the grass roots to become too empowered and that in too many instances, people whose job it was to get Democrats elected were being shut out of the process,” says McGehee.

So this means that 810 delegates are super delegates.
Actually the number is 796, and the majority of ‘SUPER’ delegates have endorsed Hillary.

Here’s a happy little chart to help you understand this. So Edwards and Unknown have 26 delegates..\

Without Michigan and Florida
Candidate
Delegates(CNN)
Superdelegates
Total
Clinton
706
201
907
Obama
707
110
817
Edwards
12
--
12
Unknown-IA
14
--
14
Undeclared
0
411
411




Updated 2/6/2008
Delegates Needed: 2025

Right, and then you have states like Florida and MI, where they broke party ‘tradition’ and are being punished, but you might see them participate, and this wouldn’t be fair, because Obama and Edwards (who was still in the race at the time, didn’t even put their names on the ballet) so umm yeah.

Yeah so to me it looks like the way things are going, the people in power, these ‘super delegates’ and if you need a list, here’s a great reference-

http://demconwatch.blogspot.com/2008/01/superdelegate-list.html

Will possibly decided who will get the nomination. And this is ok with us (the party members or the people) because we elected most of these people to office in the first place. Sure, seems fair to me- Note hint of sarcasm.

We will see what happens-