Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NAG1 who wrote (67438)	5/21/2008 3:15:49 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 544135

Neal, Here's a fairly good history of the superdelegate concept within the Dem Party. If you wish to read more than this excerpt, I've pasted the url at the end of the text. You'll notice that it was not implemented until 1982. So I gather the selection of Mondale in 1984 would have been the first potential point of us. ------------ A Brief History of Superdelegates by poblano Fri Feb 15, 2008 at 01:33:07 AM PDT To understand the origin of superdelegates, you have to understand one thing: George McGovern and the 1972 election. But let's first step back and frame things a little bit. The superdelegate system was instituted over the spring and summer of 1982 by the Commission on Presidential Nominations (CPN), a special committee of the DNC that was chaired by then North Carolina governor James B. Hunt. Superdelegates were the most important of several such changes approved by the CPN; others included shortening the primary season, and loosening the rules for pledged delegates (such that it became easier to be a 'faithless' delegate). There were a number of rationales given at the time for the implementation of superdelegates, none of which are necessarily mutually exclusive. The primary purpose of this diary will be to explore those rationales, based on a survey of contemporaneous newspaper accounts from the New York Times. However, it is also important to understand the underlying context: as of 1982, the Democrats had had two absolutely disastrous results out of the last three Presidential election cycles. dailykos.com