The Superdelegates

To wit: If Hillary Clinton has more juice on that rules committee than Barack Obama does, they might very well seat Michigan and Florida, and Hillary might actually win this thing. And anyone who doesn't recognize the significance of yet another episode of this sort of backroom cabal settling things has never lived, as I have, in a Third World country.

In places like Russia and Uzbekistan, the votes are less important than who's counting them, and the only math that matters is the aggregate of a bunch of phone calls whizzing across the capital in the middle of the night, in which the only important considerations are purely geographic in nature: Who's controlling the TV stations? The election commission? The police station near the Kremlin? The army in the Western District? At 4:08 a.m., which (read: whose) federal judge is most likely to answer his telephone? Like a game of poker, you can't guess the outcome until you know who's holding what cards.

That's where we are now, in this Clinton-Obama race. The voting thing is basically done. The rest of it comes down to a bunch of frenzied phone calls between lawyers, party hacks and superdelegates, a bunch of people you've never heard of before and will never hear of again. This ain't democracy — it's approximocracy.

One of the hallmarks of democracy is supposed to be the orderly transfer of power — having a predictable, functioning electoral system in place, one whose methodology is known and understood by voters and candidates before the contests begin. But here's the hilarious thing about this 2008 deal: No one knows how it all winds up from here. Not even George McGovern, the man who's been in the absolute epicenter of this Democratic Party system's evolution over the course of the last 40 years or so.

Like a lot of people in the party, McGovern — who endorsed Hillary Clinton last fall (mainly because "she and Bill worked their butts off for me in '72") — thinks it will be a disaster if the nomination is awarded to a candidate who trails in the delegate count. "Yeah, I think it would be — especially if that person also trails in the popular vote," he tells me. "That's why I'm going to do what I can to help bring this thing to a conclusion."

But what can you do to achieve that? How does it end from here?

"Well," he says, "I don't know exactly. Talk to the superdelegates and try to convince them to wind it up, I guess."

Back in 1968, McGovern chaired a commission that helped institute reforms intended to make the primary system more democratic, changing the process from the traditional winner-take-all format (the one still used by Republicans) to the proportional-representation deal so lamented by Clinton supporters today. By linking delegate counts to the percentage of popular vote in each state, McGovern helped ensure that each person's vote counted for something, and would be represented at the convention.

But a little democracy proved to be a messy thing. McGovern's reforms were blamed for the Carter administration, in which the party elected a president whose platform clashed with that of his own Democratic Congress. They were also blamed for a series of hilarious convention maneuvers, including one in which established party leaders like Tip O'Neill were ousted as delegates in favor of teenagers. In 1982, the party establishment moved to restore its influence by creating superdelegates, a permanent sect of party leaders who now control 20 percent of the convention vote.