No matter what happens with the superdelegates this year, it’s unsettling to have a large bloc of party officials who are not answerable to the party’s electorate. “I certainly think their influence should be curtailed,” Hart says. In 1988 Jesse Jackson won the primary in Puerto Rico over Michael Dukakis. Yet a month later, Puerto Rico’s governor instructed his fifty-one delegates to back Dukakis. “This is clearly machine politics,” Jackson wrote then, “and should have nothing to do with the 1988 campaign.” The 2008 campaign has again exposed the undemocratic influence of the superdelegate elite. But just as the activists of ’68 pushed aside the party bosses, forty years later voters can demand that the party’s nominee reflect their choice.
— Read on www.thenation.com/article/archive/not-so-superdelegates/