No, they don't. Notice that your source puts the term in quotes, to distinguish what the Reps have, "superdelegates", from what the Dems have - superdelegates, no quote marks. The question is, will the tactics employed work against Trump. Because the name recognition advantage that enabled the debate scheduling to have the effect it had, the superdelegate advantage that enabled some bandwagon argument, whatever is going on with these voting machines that consistently breaks Clinton's way, the voter suppression/restriction efforts, and so forth, look like they would mostly work in Trump's favor in the national. That wasn't what happened to single payer. What happened to single payer was that Clinton caved in advance on the best shot at it, lost anyway (partly from having discarded any negotiating leverage, leaving no reason for Republican cooperation), and ended up setting the stage for capitulation - the adoption of the Republican health care plan of 1993 - only now, twenty years later, as the Democratic plan, so its failure is going to harm liberalism and the left. Has there been a greater harm to liberalism and the left, specifically, in the past thirty years? Ok, gerrrymandering. Loss of journalism in major media. But it's a short list. The more trenchant question would be how badly the satisfaction of Clinton's successful presidency would harm liberalism and the left. Because her failures would have (will have?) pretty much the same repercussions as Sanders's, the difference between them being the much reduced possibility of benefit from Clinton's successes, if any. Suppose she succeeds, say, in prenegotiating a compromise gutting of Social Security or Medicare - offering to not privatize the whole thing all at once, but cut way back on benefits etc. and spread the full privatization out over years to come. And that then becomes the liberal or left program.
Sanders needs about 600 (out of 930) of the remaining pledged delegates to catch up to Clinton. Chances?
Unfortunately for you Iceaura, the Republican Party does have super delegates who are identical to Democratic super delegates and that doesn't change with or without quotation marks. Republican Party officials are automatically seated at the Republican convention just as Democratic super delegates are automatically seated, and if you read my previous reference you should know that. You and fellow Bernie supporters have offered a number of bogus excuses for Bernie's failures. But you and those like you have absolutely no evidence to support any of your many excuses. First it was the super delegates, then it was the debate scheduling, now its the voting machines are rigged. Everything is rigged against you and yet you have no evidence to support any of it. The stories you are required to tell in order to justify Bernie's failures are becoming increasingly complex. That should be a problem for you, but it isn't. That should be a problem for any rational person. You need to invent a reason why Bernie is losing the popular vote. So you make one up. You have no evidence, and unfortunately for your and your Bernie devotees that's a problem for most Democrats. You are playing the card Trump is playing, the victim card. It worked for Trump, but it isn't working for Bernie. Unfortunately for you and your Bernie devotees, Democrats as a group are a bit more discerning than Republicans.
The Republican Party officials who are automatically seated as delegates are not only few in number, but pledged by the vote of their State. They are just regular delegates. So they are not at all the same thing as the Democratic superdelegates, who are many in number and not bound by any popular vote - specifically not bound, as that was the whole point of creating them and the entire reason they were named "super". Trump is not playing the victim card. He is playing the rightful perpetrator card. He is running from the Republican base, claiming to represent the real Americans and backing that claim with significant voluntary grass roots support - like W, like Reagan. That is what makes him dangerous. Failure to register the nature of Trump's threat here is not going to improve Clinton's chances. Essentially zero.
The rules change by state, but that doesn't make them any less of super delegate. They are automatically seated just as Democratic super delegates and the role is reserved for party officials, and they do have a vote. "Although the term superdelegate was originally coined and created to describe a type of Democratic delegate, the term has become widely used to describe these delegates in both parties,[2] even though it is not an official term used by either party." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate Where have you been? That's all Trump has done and Bernie and his followers have dutifully followed suit. Trump claimed the "system was rigged". Bernie them claimed the system was rigged. At least Trump had some evidence to support his assertion. Party leaders and financiers were mounting a campaign against Trump using arcane party rules and praying for a 2nd ballot. No such thing happened to Bernie. But Bernie jumped on board the victim train. Now Trump is claiming he is being victimized by the judge who is hearing the fraud law suit against him. If you listen to Trump and to Bernie they both play the victim card frequently. They are frequent fliers.
Yes, it does. The entire purpose of creating the superdelegates in the Dem Party was to provide the Party establishment with a substantial number of voting delegates independent from the popular vote - that's the situation behind the Sanders campaign complaint (these delegates were consistently counted as pledged to Clinton, which was not true and damaged his campaign), that's where the "super" designation came from, and that's what the whole discussion is about. There are no such delegates in the Republican Party. The few official delegates, who got their seats by being Party officials, are pledged by the popular vote. As noted, failure to recognize the nature of Trump's threat is poor preparation for meeting it. If Clinton has no better idea of what she's up against here - and her campaign's handling of Sanders is worrisome in that respect - she is going to get blindsided.
Anticlimax Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! That was actually surprising: Striding into history, Hillary Clinton will become the first woman to top the presidential ticket of a major U.S. political party, capturing commitments Monday from the number of delegates needed to win the Democratic nomination. (Yen, et al.↱) It's interesting because while the Sanders campaign has responded about as we might expect, lamenting a "rush to judgment" by the media, the Clinton campaign is not rushing to a victory lap. Early commentary on msnbc has been notably sympathetic to Bernie Sanders, with Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Andrea Mitchell, among others, puzzling over the timing. The Associated Press announced the the threshold with an eye to history; the story assembled by Hope Yen, Stephen Olemacher, Lisa Lerer, and Catherine Lucey―with additional help from Julie Pace, Julie Bykowicz, and Ken Thomas―opens with a high nod to shattering the glass ceiling, and descends from there into a virtual obituary: Clinton has 1,812 pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses. She also has the support of 571 superdelegates, according to an Associated Press count. The AP surveyed all 714 superdelegates repeatedly in the past seven months, and only 95 remain publicly uncommitted. Sanders' campaign said it was a "rush to judgment" to declare Clinton the presumptive nominee given that superdelegates can switch their support before the Democratic convention in late July. "Our job from now until the convention is to convince those superdelegates that Bernie is by far the strongest candidate against Donald Trump," said Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs. The supredelegates counted in Clinton's tally have unequivocally told the AP they will do so. ‡ Clinton outpaced Sanders in winning new superdelegate endorsements even after his string of primary and caucus wins in May. Following the results in Puerto Rico, it is no longer possible for Sanders to reach the 2,383 needed to win the nomination based on the remaining available pledged delegates and uncommitted superdelegates. ‡ Indeed, Clinton's victory is broadly decisive. She leads Sanders by more than 3 million cast votes, by 291 pledged delegates and by 523 superdelegates. She won 29 caucuses and primaries to his 21 victories. That's a far bigger margin than Obama had in 2008, when he led Clinton by 131 pledged delegates and 105 superdelegates at the point he clinched the nomination. Echoing the sentiments of California Gov. Jerry Brown, who overcame a decades-long rivalry with the Clinton family to endorse her last week, many superdelegates expressed a desire to close ranks around a nominee who could defeat Trump in November. ‡ Though she marched into her second presidential primary campaign as an overwhelming favorite, Clinton could not shake Sanders until its final days. He campaigned aggressively in California ahead of the state's Tuesday election, unwilling to exit a race Clinton stood on the cusp of winning. Beyond winning over millions of Sanders supporters who vow to remain loyal to the self-described democratic socialist, Clinton faces challenges as she turns toward November, including criticism of her decision to use a private email server run from her New York home while serving as secretary of state. Her deep unpopularity among Republicans has pushed many leery of Trump to nevertheless embrace his campaign. ‡ Yet Clinton showed no signs of limping into the general election as she approached the milestone, leaving Sanders behind and focusing on lacerating Trump. She said electing the billionaire businessman, who has spent months hitting her and her husband with bitingly personal attacks, would be a "historic mistake." Talk about piling on. The Associated Press just wrote Bernie Sanders out of the presidential campaign. Unlike the day Donald Trump clinched the GOP nomination, the newly-committed superdelegates have not rushed front and center. Then again, if you're, say, South Dakota, timing commitment in order to seal the nomination is actually a pretty good prestige maneuver. And it really is an interesting question: Why today? It is one thing to suggest the point is to start visibly rolling up the promenade, but these are superdelegates―professional political hands―who are capable of recognizing the obvious contextual challenges. That is, it's one thing to roll up the sidewalk but quite another to do so when you will so inevitably and thoroughly piss off so many people by doing so. And those aren't simply Sanders backers; plenty of Clinton's supporters are scratching their heads and cussing quietly to themselves. This was going to happen tomorrow, anyway. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!____________________ Notes: Clinton, Hillary R. "We're flattered". Twitter. 6 June 2016. Twitter.com. 6 June 2016. http://bit.ly/1Yc0Lor Yen, Hope, Stephen Ohlemacher, Lisa Lerer and Catherine Lucey. "AP count: Clinton has delegates to win Democratic nomination". Associated Press. 6 June 2016. Hosted.AP.org. 6 June 2016. http://apne.ws/1U56R71 Edit: 6 June 2016 [19.40 PDT] ― Add HRC response tweet.
The obvious first guess is that Clinton both wants and needs the bump in California, or somebody at AP thinks she does. That has been the theme of the superdelegate publicity since day one. It's clumsy, in other words - another continuing theme with this campaign.
History has just been made. Hillary Clinton just reached enough delegates to be the presumptive nominee for the Democratic Party. This is a great day for all Americans. The choice will be clear come November: equality, education, and globalization, or bigotry, isolationism, and a nuclear war. This time tomorrow night there will be a California breeze filling the sails of the SS Hillary. Get on board Bernie.
You probably ought to be careful saying, "SS Hillary", around the Bern. I'm sure we'll be hearing that one, eventually.
Best pare that down a bit - to education vs bigotry, maybe. Clinton's advocacy of "globalization" is problematic in its belligerence as well as domestic economic effect, and quite a few people think she represents a significantly greater risk of nuclear war than Trump. Unless you think a "run on exactly what you are not, attack your opponent's strength" tactic would work against Trump? It's common in selling brands, like Coke or Cadillac, but a bit sophisticated for the current US political scene.
What is it about supporting Clinton that renders people unable to think, read, or register ordinary facts? Or do I have the sequence inverted? At any rate: one hopes this ubiquitous supporters's inability to recognize the nature of Clinton's career, abilities, or appeal, and/or lack of same, does not also afflict the Democratic campaign strategists. Because if recent history is any clue, Trump's base of support isn't going to shrink.
Or so you might hope. Make America Great Again! Yippeee! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Breaking Bitch Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Actually, I think the big problem is the craven pursuit of Clinton as quarry. To wit, when the question involves superdelegates and press, the natural inclination is to blame Hillary Clinton. While it is true that blaming the opponent for everything is standard political fare, we should bear two points in mind: (1) Sanders supporters can't deal with accurate criticism of their candidate, and (2) the bigotry is just getting sickening: In colloquial terms, a woman has to be twice as good to be taken half as seriously. Which is why Sanders's behavior in recent weeks is so troubling. Clinton has won, fair and square. She has more votes. She has more pledged delegates. She has more superdelegates. She has more voters. Even if you tweaked the rules, she is the winner. Every "what if" scenario―what if we got rid of the superdelegates? what if the Democrats used Republican rules? what if there were more open primaries?―Clinton still wins. There is no rational reason for Sanders and his supporters to act like he is somehow more deserving of this than Clinton. And yet, Sanders is carrying on as if it's obvious that he deserves to win, and just a little more pressure will cause everyone to finally see it and give him what he clearly believes is his due. Thus all the chatter about how the system is "rigged." Whatever is in his heart, Sanders is coasting on male privilege right now, namely the male privilege of being assumed to be more competent and more worthy than a female competitor, even if she has demonstrated her value by all objective measures. This problem isn't unique to Sanders. On the contrary, it's common as dirt. When a woman or person of color has shown great success, people in the dominant group often argue that they can't have done this on their own, but had to have gotten there by cheating. You see that every time conservatives gripe about "affirmative action," assuming that people of color who get into college somehow are edging out more deserving white people by doing so. You see it with Donald Trump arguing that Clinton is only winning by playing the "woman card," a blatant expression of the belief that women can only win by cheating .... .... If Clinton was a man, the notion that it's self-evident that Sanders is somehow the "true" winner would be a much harder sell. It would make him a laughingstock, in fact. But the notion that a woman who does so well must be an imposter has a lot of emotional salience in our culture. Whether it's enough to help boost Sanders to a convention fight even after Clinton gains a clean majority of pledged delegates, however, remains to be seen. Here's a conundrum: Amanda Marcotte↱ spent sixteen paragraphs on an article; thirteen could go into the above quote. That bit about "even if you tweaked the rules", for instance, would eat up three or four paragraphs, and there are two more about sexism specifically setting up the citation, and there are two clarifying paragraphs struck under the ellipsis. This is one of those extraordinary cycles in which we're supposed to believe every striking coincidence is mere accident. And it's kind of like the bit with AP's delegate count and superdelegate commitments; as I wrote elsewhere↱: This really can work out to an accident of circumstance; indeed, that would be the strongest presumption. Nonetheless, there really is a reason why this prickles. That is to say, Really? On the eve of American history itself, we find a way to bungle this up with a cloud of controversy? Or, as Marcotte puts it: While it's currently hip to sneer at every suggestion that sexism might be playing a role in the stubbornness of the Sanders camp, the contradictory, grasping nature of Sanders' arguments sure makes it harder to pull off the "no sexism to see here" shenanigans. Sanders' weak responses to controversial behavior in his larger movement has grown tremendous frustration among Democrats, leading up to what seems the turning point, the Nevada convention. To a certain degree the press has had it, but the Democratic Party is, in that once-upon-a-time political tradition, mincing around in order to not tell Mr. Sanders, straight up, to go fuck himself. But early among those weak responses was the question of the #BernieBros, and I can remember essentially two points from that: First is that Bernie Sanders cannot be held responsible for other people's actions; second is that someone in Hillary's camp said something a Bernie supporter didn't like, so the supporter didn't want to back Hillary in the general. In other words, the #BernieBros question just kept simmering, unaddressed. Mr. Sanders has also spent a good amount of effort aiming to delegitimize Hillary Clinton's success, attacking black voters along the way and telling women to stop moaning about misogyny. Some of his supporters have even slipped into the myth of wishing Bernie was a woman so he could enjoy all the unfair advantages they have. But in the context of "no sexism to see here", we find ourselves again saying, sure, this can be an accident of circumstnace, but come on, at some point we question the boundaries of what describes an accident. It's the sort of "accident" I could claim in my twenties; you know, I'm not trying to be misogynist, just, you know, attending the traditional expectations of my society. That is, there comes a point where accident of circumstance simply means one is unable to recognize they are doing anything wrong. So let's take a moment to entertain a Sanders supporter's petulant fantasy↱ about the FBI arresting Hillary Clinton. And let us pretend this happened last year. And so Martin O'Malley starts racking up votes among Democrats more attuned to supportable policy platforms, and by this time Bernie Sanders is left trying to delegitimize black voters, legitimize misogyny, and complain that his three million vote deficit something, something, convoluted logic, superdelegates should overturn the will of voters now that it's what Bernie needs, &c., ad nauseam. Marcotte proposes, "If Clinton was a man, the notion that it's self-evident that Sanders is somehow the 'true' winner would be a much harder sell. It would make him a laughingstock, in fact." And it seems rather quite hard to argue against that point. Within that framework? Yes, it absolutely makes sense: If the question involves superdelegates and press, then the natural inclination is to blame Hillary Clinton. But run the obvious objection to earth: Why would the campaign want this? Blaming Clinton and her campaign for decisions of superdelegates and Associated Press is pathetic. Here's the logic we're required to believe: On the eve of winning at the ballot box enough votes to push Hillary Clinton over the pledged threshold, thus making her the apparent first female presidential nominee from a major political party in the United States of America, the campaign coordinates or colludes with superdelegates and a press agency to give her that bump a day early in such a fashion as to surely move Sanders supporters to delegitimize her victory. This is how stupid we need to believe that evil bitch really is. But think about it. In the end it fits well enough with what I've been hearing from the Sanders movement: After all, if Hillary Clinton has survived the challenges of the American political arena, it can only be because she is corrupt and enjoys too many advantages traditionally given to women. Because nobody who is so stupid as to behave as the logic we are required to believe in order to blame Hillary Clinton for the latest superdelegates to announce and the AP's coverage thereof can actually navigate these shark-infested, tumultuous waters and survive on their own merit. We can believe this all comes together by accident; it's not a particularly extraordinary proposition. To the other, though, that accident would describe a larger problem. Furthermore, the pattern is possibly reflected again in the general tenor of the Democratic campaign. This is a cycle in which a traditional outlook on Democratic civil rights prizes are as near to grasp as I have witnessed; naturally, the thing to do is walk away from those goals in order to pursue another platform, and it turns out the chief advocate just hasn't given it a whole lot of thought. That is, I easily could have suggested, at the outset, that society would do everything short of outright saying, "No, because you're a woman!" in order to challenge the rise of our first female president. To the other, these months later, while it is easy enough hem and haw, part of the problem is the continued appearance. The Associated Press rains on Hillary Clinton's parade simply by not holding a headline on the latest delegate count after some undeclared superdelegates declare, and we are supposed to blame Hillary Clinton. We can't get much more straightforward than that. Something about a harder sell goes here. And a laughingstock. (Edit: [7 June 2016, 10.11 PDT] Multiple corrections, typo & syntax, for clarification.)
Notes for #278 Above Goodman, H. A. "Please, FBI — you’re our last hope: The Democratic Party’s future rests upon your probe of Hillary Clinton’s emails". Salon. 27 April 2016. Salon.com. 7 June 2016. http://bit.ly/1TfnrxV Marcotte, Amanda. "Why can’t Sanders admit defeat? He’s looking more and more foolish as he denies Hillary’s victory". Salon. 6 June 2016. Salon.com. 7 June 2016. http://bit.ly/28hQnQs
