Lies we Tell to Children: America is a Model Democracy

Welcome to Super Tuesday, what was supposed the be the season-defining superbowl moment of American politics, the middle turning point in the ongoing slow-motion car crash that is Fuckup 2008.

Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards have dropped out, leaving Mike Gravel as the self-proclaimed only real progressive left in the race. Regardless of whether or not Obama plans on honoring any of his promises to make a change for the better, Hillary Clinton is a preprogrammed robotic timebomb serving a cabal of military industrialists oil czars and hedge fund managers, or Mike Gravel is actually still in the race in any real sense, tonight has decided nothing.

In fact, it is appearing more and more likely that the race is going to be won by the most terrifyingly antidemocratic feature of our democratic system: superdelegates.

Superdelegates, unlike lake sharks, are not part of the lies we tell to children. Also unlike like sharks, they are things that do exist and should not. However, they are exactly like lake sharks in their supernatural ability to glide silently over the morning dew. Don't go down to the lake until the sun has been up long enough to dry up all the grass, or an ex-president will leap from the brush to tear open your jugular and elect a delegate you never voted for. (Thanks, Jeremy Hoople's father. Second best lie told to a child ever. The first may end up as another post.)

As you have probably not been able to glean from that extended whimsical comparison, superdelegates are members of the Democratic National Convention who, by virtue of having held positions of power in the past, hold a position of power in the present: they can participate in the selection process of the Democratic Nominee, voting just as other delegates do, and, unlike other delegates, they are not required to vote according to the votes of any group of normal citizens. This is why, of the 2,025 delegates needed for the nomination, Hillary Clinton had over a hundred before the first state primary had been held.

As of the time I'm writing this, the New York Times is displaying the A.P. delegate count for Clinton and Obama at 626 to 531. Of those, 204 and 99 are superdelegates. And while I'm sure those numbers will have changed by the time I finish this post, the deciding factor in the race right now is the fact that more cronyistic holdovers from bygone eras are supporting Hillary than Obama. As the state-by-state, county-by-county battle for supremacy continues, it seems more and more likely that the swing factor in the race to 2,025 will be the more than five hundred superdelegates who have yet to decide which factory-assembled candidate best represents their personal agendas.

I apologize for the dryness of this post, and the overproliferation of numbers. I apologize if you heard this somewhere else first.

You should still be angry. Somewhere, someone is making all this effort, all this organizing and arguing and aggregate motion of the human element, meaningless. The party will pick who best represents the party's interests, not the people's.

This, as Mike Gravel would say, is politics as usual.