Completely Unnecessary

[Ed note: This got a bit long. I like to think it gets rather rousing at the end, though. My apologies for both the length and possible rousing.]

People have been fairly critical of Geraldine Ferraro’s 25 February NYT Op-ed concerning superdelegates.

Fair enough, really!

Ferraro claims that we should look to superdelegates to make our decisions for us because, as party leaders, they know what is best for us. Also, she claims, the low percentage primaries are unrepresentative and ‘do not necessarily reflect the will of rank-and-file Democrats.’

Though, of course, you would assume that those rank-and-file diehards are the ones actually voting in the primaries. Regardless, Ferraro would like party leaders to help those disenfranchised party faithful that couldn’t be bothered to go to the polls.

But those are just the closed primaries. Did you know that in open primaries, people who have not previously been registered with the Democratic Party or even Republicans or Independents can vote for Democrats?

Now, there are cases of people crossing party lines to select a weak candidate or kill someone’s candidacy (see: Cynthia McKinney). There’s been nothing to show, however, that’s been a serious problem in this primary season.

Here’s the part of the ‘open primaries’ section of her piece that really gets to me:

If rank-and-file Democrats should decide who the party’s nominee is, each state should pass a rule allowing only people who have been registered in the Democratic Party for a given time — not nonmembers or day-of registrants — to vote for the party’s nominee.

That is incredibly wrongheaded. In the words of the wonderful Barbara Jordan at the 1976 DNC:

First, we [Democrats] believe in equality for all and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are inclusive rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.

Ferraro goes on to argue that those who sincerely want ‘the people’ to decide should agitate for the inclusion of the Florida and Michigan delegates. In these states, she notes, the “votes of thousands of rank-and-file party members will not be counted because their states voted on dates earlier than those authorized by the national party.”

Ferraro is trying to catch those who would argue against the superdelegate uber-wisdom in a trap. Either they agree with her, or they should argue for the rights of those disenfranchised voters in FL and MI. Both states went handily to Clinton, the candidate Ferraro supports. What she doesn’t mention is that in Michigan, Clinton was the only viable candidate on the ticket. And Michigan has one of those disastrous open primaries she’s warned us about.

The reason Democrats have lost the majority of elections since 1980 isn’t because we’ve been ignoring the sage advice of party leaders.

To reassure ourselves of that we need only look at 1984, the election in which Ferraro was the candidate for vice-president. One. lonely. state. we managed to win that year. And we only won that because Mondale pulled funds from other states to prevent the loss of MN. The Mondale-Ferraro ticket was outmatched and outplayed, partly because of Ferraro’s reluctance to come clean about her husband’s financial dealings.

1992 and 1996 aside (and with plenty of help from Ross Perot), we either haven’t had the best candidate or we haven’t had the best strategy. This year, we’ve got the goods in both Clinton and Obama, so what we need to worry about is an effective strategy to get that across to the voters.

And what alarms me about this editorial is that - as a prominent surrogate for Clinton - Ferraro’s editorial must have been passed across the desk of a high-level Clinton campaign staffer. If they approved it, that was a tremendous mistake. And if they didn’t, it’s yet another case of the Clinton campaign’s seeming inability to control their surrogates.

What an outrageously terrible plan - shaking your finger at half your party, telling them, ‘You unworthy Democrats are stuffing up the choice we’ve graciously given you.’

Ferraro fears that the stripping of FL and MI delegates is ‘a slight [those] voters might not easily forget in November.’ It was the sage party leaders of the DNC that made that decision. Should Clinton be the nominee, she’d better hope more voters than that forget this nepotist public shaming in the guise of an opinion piece.

New Democrats, young Democrats, rank-and-file Democrats, grassroots Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Greens, first-time voters, everyone - we want you. All of you. And I hope to god, this is the election in which we prove it to you.

No more backroom deals from The Handful.

Let everybody come.

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