IX: Obama’s Triumph of the Will: The 2008 Primaries 337convention, sharply reduced the number of senators and congressmen who served as delegates.
These officeholders were less inclined to support the party’s standard-bearer when they had played
no role in the convention. There were also far fewer trade union leaders as delegates, with
correspondingly more environmentalists, sexual orientation activists, and minority militants. The
Daley machine of Illinois had simply ignored the McGovern recommendations. A floor fight over
the seating of the Illinois delegation ensued, with Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago clashing with
Jesse Jackson, leader of the reform slate. Daley was ousted and Jackson was seated. McGovern then
used the new system he had helped to design in order to seize the 1972 nomination, resulting in his
catastrophic defeat. McGovern won Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in one of the
biggest defeats in US history. Between 1972 and 1988 there were a series of commissions that were
supposed to reform the rules; a 1973 commission chaired by City Councilor Barbara Mikulski of
Baltimore scaled back some of the affirmative action provisions in McGovern’s rules and explicitly
prohibited winner-take-all primaries. Another commission in 1978 turned down the idea of
superdelegates. In June 1988, representatives of Dukakis and Jesse Jackson reworked the rules for
picking a Democratic Party nominee, creating an elaborate framework for selecting delegates based
on proportion of votes in states and congressional districts, with an additional role played by party
elders in the form of superdelegates. By 1980, the proportion of Democratic senators who served as
delegates had declined to 14 percent, down from 68 percent in 1960. Elected officials were unhappy
because they were obliged to run against their own voters and constituents for seats at the
convention. Therefore, there was support for the introduction of superdelegates, meaning party
veterans and elected officials. The one legitimate purpose served by this innovation was to have
some experienced people on the floor of the convention who could say no to a new hysteria of the
type that had propelled the obviously doomed George McGovern to the nomination in 1972. But
Obama and Axelrod had seen that the entire mechanism by 2008 was ripe for the most cynical
gaming. The Electoral College had been designed to give one candidate a convincing and
significant majority of the electoral votes, by ruling out proportional representation and instituting a
winner take all system.
The modern Democratic Party system, motivated by politically correct and multicultural
postmodern criteria did just the opposite: it tended to prevent the emergence of a winner based on
the Electoral College mega states fairly early in the game. The Democratic party rules were
therefore completely dysfunctional, and they had become a major factor in the breakdown of the
entire US political system during the year 2008. These rules were a insane, and the fact was widely
recognized. “This is the nightmare” that all the commissions sought to avoid, said consultant Bill
Carrick, who was part of the 1982 reform panel, in 2008. It was bad enough that the nomination was
in the hands of the party’s 795 “superdelegates,” who constitute party insiders. Even worse was the
fact that these superdelegates seemed to lack the elementary instinct for survival that would have
impelled them to give Clinton the nomination based on her superior ability to win the White House.
Again, obedience to Wall Street, and not any notion of solidarity with the black community, was the
main factor involved. In 1980, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts ran against President
Jimmy Carter in the primaries. Kennedy organized a series of rules challenges against Carter at that
year’s chaotic convention in New York City, triggering another bout of Democratic soul-searching.
“There was a palpable sense that this rules fight was really taking the party down,” said the party
hack Elaine Kamarck, a Carter backer in 1980. “People felt, if only there had been more elected
officials on the floor of the convention, maybe they could have short-circuited this.” There was
much dithering, leading to the creation of another commission chaired by James Hunt, the governor
of North Carolina, which recommended rolling back some of the more extravagant “reforms.” But it
was the Hunt commission that made Democratic members of Congress into automatic delegates, the