My colleague Brian Devine, a good Democrat even though he once sported a Fred Thompson sticker on his car (next to one for Mark Warner), is not enthusiastic about where the fight for his party’s nomination is headed:
The point of all this is that since the primary is so close, one of these two groups composed of the Democratic leadership — the superdelegates or the credentials committee — will be the body that decides who will become the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nominee. And not the voters. Prior to today, I believed that the largest flaw in our electoral system was the leapfrogging of states for earlier primary dates. But now it is clear that I was wrong. The Democratic Party can’t get much more undemocratic than not letting the people decide.
There’s more to it than that, and if you’re unfamiliar with the situation he quotes enough to give you the full background.
Meantime, I’m left more than a little amused that the Republican Party nomination process — which features no superdelegates and dealt with its state parties’ “earliest” one-upsmanship in a less extreme manner — is actually more democratic than that of the Democratic Party.
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