Catch of the Day

To Scott Lemieux for (once again) shooting down liberal fantasies that the only thing preventing Congress from passing single-payer health care insurance in 2009-2010 was a failure of will from the president.

It's an excellent job, and sadly necessary, over and over again.

One key point that Lemieux doesn't mention this time: in one sense, this really isn't about 2009 at all. It's about 2007 and 2008, when the three leading Democratic presidential candidates converged on essentially the same plan (with Obama famously omitting the individual mandate). That says a lot. It says that none of those three candidates believed that adopting single-payer would have given them a serious edge in a closely contested nomination fight -- and that no other candidate was able to leap to the top tier by embracing single-payer. In other words, it tells us that in the world of 2007-2008, at least, the ACA was mainstream within the actual Democratic Party as it was, and single-payer was a fringe position in the actual Democratic Party as it was. Maybe lots and lots of Democrats preferred single-payer in some sense, but virtually none of them, either elites or electorates, did anything about it. And that's what counts.

What this also means is that ACA vs. single-payer had virtually nothing to do with Barack Obama himself. And so Obama-centric explanations for it are clearly, 100%, wrong.

I'd further argue, although here it's not quite as clear, that there was very little about the way that Obama fought for the ACA that had much to do with Obama himself. Yes, a Hillary Clinton WH would have looked a little different from the Obama WH...but not all that very different. Yes, presidents themselves do make key decisions, and not their staff or their party. But not only are they often severely constrained by their party (and by Congress, and by lots of other things), but they're also highly influenced by the incentives of the job, and those are the same whether we're talking Obama, Clinton, or George W. Bush.

In short, there's an excellent chance that both the good and bad outcomes on health care reform would have wound up more or less the same whether the winner of the 2008 Democratic nomination was Obama, or Hillary, or a hypothetically unscandaled John Edwards, or for that matter John Kerry or Al Gore.

Meanwhile: nice catch!

Read Stuff, You Should

Happy Birthday to Von Joshua, 65. What's not to like? Picked up on waivers from the Dodgers just in time for a freakishly good 27 year old season, then let go 40 games into the next year after he turned back into a 4th outfielder at best. I suppose the downside is that his "emergence" might have had something to do with giving away Garry Maddox, but the Giants in those years were foolish enough to have done that anyway, alas.

Good stuff:

1. Steve M. on "the low-information media." Oy.

2. Andrew Rudalevige has something to say about "juice," too.

3. Yes, Obama beats McCain without the financial crisis. There was a months-old recession before that, you know. Harry Enten with the numbers.

4. And Conor Friedersdorf is not impressed with Frank Luntz. Join the club!

Nevada Turnout Note

I've seen a lot of people comparing Nevada turnout to 2008. Careful! Remember, context matters. Several issues...in 2008, Nevada had just moved up in the process, and so it was sort of a first-time thing, which might have increased turnout over this year. It was also essentially earlier in the process. In 2008, Nevada went on the same day as South Carolina, and before Florida -- although Michigan had squeezed in between New Hampshire and Nevada/South Carolina. Between the calendar and the way the process played out, the nomination was far more up for grabs when Nevada caucused in 2008 than it was this time around. In fact, there were still three viable candidates at that point (McCain, Huck, and Romney), and the press was still treating Fred Thompson and Giuliani as viable candidates, although they really weren't. And Ron Paul was Ron Paul.

I have no idea how to adjust for any of that, but at least in my view it's silly to do a straight year-to-year comparison without keeping the context in mind.

Sunday Question for Conservatives

For the second consecutive cycle, one might argue that there hasn't been a single Republican presidential candidate with conventional credentials and a history of mainstream conservative positions on the public policy issues conservatives care most about (with Rick Perry, who has had other problems, as perhaps the biggest exception). Why do you think that's happened?

Sunday Question for Liberals

Let's try a little counterfactual...suppose that Jim Martin had edged Saxby Chambliss in Georgia in 2008 (he lost by 100K votes in the initial round) and that Bruce Lunsford had nosed out Mitch McConnell (another 100K votes). Or, perhaps, substitute for one of those Harold Ford beating Bob Corker in 2006 (just 40K votes). Along with that, give Al Franken enough votes or court decisions or whatever to be seated right at the beginning of the 111th Congress. In other words, suppose the Democrats had been a little lucky (or luckier) and had 61 Senators from the beginning of Barack Obama's presidency (not counting Arlen Specter, that is).

OK, what do you think would have been different? On the initial and subsequent stimulus bills, on health care, on climate, on banking reform, on nominations...how does everything play out?

(Unless you have a strong argument, I'd recommend assuming that the Tea Party stuff basically is unchanged. Also, I want to credit Richard Skinner for inspiring this, via email. Thanks!)

No, Really, Forget the Electoral College For Now

One more time: there's just no reason to pay very much attention to state-by-state stuff if you're trying to project a winner in 2012.

Maybe I'm just grumpy today, but when I read this sort of thing it just sets me off:

To win reelection, President Obama needs to match his 2008 performance in four swing states: Florida, Nevada, Michigan and North Carolina.

That's the normally very sensible Jamelle Bouie, reacting to a WSJ article about unemployment in those states. It's not just Bouie; Dylan Matthews quoted the original article seemingly approvingly in this morning's Wonkbook. Sorry, but no dice.

OK, to begin with: obviously, Obama doesn't need to match his 2008 performance in those states. I mean, among other things, Obama won Nevada by 12.5 points; that means that he could run 12 points worse and still win there.

Continuing...a better way to look at it would be to think about the effects of a nationwide 7 point swing away from Obama, since he won by 7 points. Looking at the results...Obama would lose IN, FL, NC, OH, and VA (and I'll toss in the EV from Nebraska). Without adjusting for reapportionment, that would have been 87 EVs lost, for a 278-260 win. So Obama can actually afford a uniform 7+ point swing.

Suppose that it's worse. Then the question is: where? The next few states (that is, the closest states on the Obama side after a uniform 7 point swing) are CO, IA, NH, MN, PA. So, once again positing a uniform swing, those are the states that Obama needs to do well in. As the swing goes from 7 points to the GOP to 11 points, he gradually loses each of those, and with them the election. To begin with, then, I'd start with those states, none of which are the WSJ four.

Now, here's the thing. Suppose that, for example, Nevada has a larger-than-average swing away from Obama, thanks to its unusually high unemployment rate. But that implies that some other state will have a smaller-than-average shift! And that's true, also, if the question is the demographic factors Bouie looks at as opposed to general economic effects. So maybe the states reshuffle a bit; in fact, looking election-to-election, there's always some reshuffling going on, for a wide variety of short- and long-term reasons. Some of them are easy to see in advance (demographic changes can yield fairly predictable partisan changes), while others are a lot harder from this point, because they depend on how the campaigns go and other things we can't yet predict. Note, too, that the various states mentioned above and the others that were a bit stronger for Obama in 2008 (WI, NM, NJ) really don't have all that much in common, so it's not especially likely that there will be something that pushes all (or none) of these states in the same direction compared to the overall average.

The point is that all of this is going to be basically irrelevant if Obama runs within a few points nationally of where he was in 2008, and it's also going to be irrelevant if he runs a dozen points worse -- in other words, if he wins or loses nationally by a few points or more. It probably doesn't matter even if he only wins or loses by a single point nationwide. And if it's closer than that, it's basically impossible to know right now if the key states turn out to be, say, Iowa or Nevada or Pennsylvania, and those are three very different states.

Before Normalcy

I've been annoyed about today's Ross Douthat's column all day, so I suppose I should write something about it. 

Here's the paragraph that annoyed me:

The fantasy was the idea that Barack Obama, a one-term senator with an appealing biography and a silver tongue, would turn out to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Robert F. Kennedy and Mahatma Gandhi all rolled into one. This fantasy inspired a wave of 1960s-style enthusiasm, an unsettling personality cult (that “Yes We Can” video full of harmonizing celebrities only gets creepier in hindsight) and a lot of over-the-top promises from Obama himself. It persuaded Democrats that the laws of politics had been suspended, and that every legislative goal they’d ever dreamed about was now within reach.

I'm almost completely certain that this gets 2008 entirely wrong.

Yes, it's probably true that some Obama supporters, especially those who are young or otherwise new to politics, mistakenly believed that winning an election automatically means enacting every campaign promise.  More seasoned observers know that, for better or worse, that's not how the Madisonian system works.

Was that more the case in 2008 than in any other election year?  To the extent that there were more young and new voters, perhaps; otherwise, it's just a regular feature of American politics. 

As is the idea that the candidate is something special.  In this, Obama is no different than any other nominee I can remember.  This is all utterly normal, boring, and predictable.  Activists get enchanted by candidate?  C'mon, that's the oldest story in the book.  Happened with George W. Bush, happened with Bill Clinton, happened with Ronald Reagan, happened, sad to say, with Jimmy Carter...happened, too, with most of the losers, at least for a brief moment when they looked as if they might be winners.  (Did Democrats once think that Michael Dukakis was all that and a bag of chips?  They did.  Did Republicans think it of Bob Dole?  Yeah, in a way; they thought, at least briefly, that he was the grown-up in the room, the guy who could return America to sensible governing).  I'm not going to go back and find supporting quotations, but every party's nominee is popular within the party by convention time -- first of all, that's how they become the nominee, and besides that once they're de facto nominated the party machinery starts pitching their virtues to the rank and file, and every politician has sufficient virtues that the rank and file can be convinced. 

But some particular fetish for Obama?  Nah, that was just a GOP campaign talking point.  Douthat should know better than to believe it.

What actually dominated American politics wasn't a fantasy; it was the reality of successive landslides, yielding very large Democratic and liberal majorities in the House and Senate along with a liberal Democrat in the White House. 

Those landslides made long-time liberal goals (some popular, like DADT repeal; some less so) entirely realistic.  It was no fantasy that health care reform, the top agenda item of the Democratic Party for over a generation, was now a realistic possibility; it was reality.  It wasn't fantasy, either, that the things that didn't get done, whether it was card check or climate/energy or detention policy, were realistic possibilities.  Getting it all done was highly unlikely (and probably impossible after the economy went from recession to disaster in fall '08), but exactly which ones would pass and which would be left behind was anyone's guess, and depended, in part, on activism by various party factions. 

Douthat's tribute to the lame duck session is that:

In this brave new postelection world, lawmakers on both sides stopped behaving like players in some Beltway version of the battle at Armageddon and started behaving like, well, lawmakers. They cut deals, traded horses, preened (and sometimes whined) for the cameras, and cast their votes on a mix of principle, pique and political self-interest, rather than just falling into line for or against the Obama agenda. 

That's just nonsense.  Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the rest of them --Waxman, Dodd, Frank, Baucus, and more -- were of course acting as legislators throughout the 111th.  They hardly needed Barack Obama to tell them they were for a large stimulus, for health care, for banking reform, for DADT repeal.   

And, well, so were Republicans; they were mostly opposing things because, well, they (and the coalitions who voted them in) opposed those things.  Of course, there was also some political gamesmanship on both sides, although I'd say relatively little; most of the fighting was over real, substantive legislation.  Here's my bet: in the new Congress, with a whole lot less at stake, we'll have more, not less, simple partisan maneuvering.

Douthat is, indeed, right that with the midterm election we're returning to normalcy; in most years since the late 1930s, neither liberals nor conservatives have had the votes to enact their core agendas, or even very large portions of those agendas.  But the idea that the occasional extraordinary periods in which those majorities exist are about hero-worship (or, for that matter, villain-hating) gets things totally wrong. 

Very Very Temporary

Via Sargent, I see that the historian Julian Zelizer is arguing that the electoral comeback of Republicans was and should have been unexpected from the perspective of November 2008:

[O]ne of the major stories of Obama’s presidency has been the revitalization of conservatism. Within only two years, Republicans have regained control of the House of Representatives through a dramatic midterm election. There are now an abundance of Republicans, some old (Newt Gingrich) and some new (Paul Ryan and Sarah Palin), who are jumping over each other to campaign for president in 2012. Republicans have been able to join hands, despite their differences, by using President Obama as their foil...

It is too easy to say that pundits simply exaggerated the crisis of conservatism. The problems facing the right toward the end of Bush’s presidency were very real and their ability to rebound was not inevitable. 

I'm really not convinced.  I don't think a GOP comeback is surprising at all -- yes, the extent of GOP gains in November 2010 were at the high end of the range, but some sort of bounce back was expected, certainly by standard political science models. 

As far as public opinion is concerned, John Sides had an excellent post up recently showing that opinion often moves against policy: that is, when Washington enacts conservative policies, people get more liberal, and vice versa. 

The same thing is basically true about election results.  Indeed, the most notable thing about unified liberal or conservative control of the presidency and Congress is how rare and brief it's been since the New Deal.  Yes, FDR did in fact keep large liberal majorities intact for about six years.  But since then, there really haven't been extended periods of either liberal or conservative working majorities in House, Senate, and White House at the same time.   Even under unified government (as in 1977-1980 or 2003-2006), majorities have typically been too small to allow either side to enact their core agenda, or at least much of it. 

If in fact people did believe that 2008 (and 2004, and 1994, and 1992, and 1980, among others) were going to be different, I'm afraid that a fair amount of the blame should go to the now-rejected theory of "critical elections" and "realignment."  Most (but not all) political scientists now, I think, have given up on thinking about party control in that way, but it has shown up and still sometimes appears in the textbooks that we use to teach our Intro to American Politics classes, which means there are a lot of people out there who have Officially Certified Learning that are expecting a critical election one of these years. 

Meanwhile, although it's obviously correct that Republicans did very will in 2010, I'm not at all sure that the diagnosis of conservatives that people were making two years ago was very far off.  The Republican Party is still unpopular, and at least to my reading conservatives are still far from having a viable policy agenda to meet the major issues of the day -- unlike, say, their agenda in 1980.  What pundits missed, perhaps, is that it's very possible for a party to win elections despite all those problems. 

At any rate, the point is that it was a mistake in 2008 to believe that there was anything permanent about the Democrats' success, just as it was a mistake in 2004 to believe that there was anything permanent about the Republicans' success.  That's just not how American politics works.  We have two parties: bad things are going to happen, the in-party is going to be blamed, and the out-party is going to benefit regardless of what it's been up to in the meantime.  That dynamic works whether the in-party is actually at fault or not.  It even works, as Democrats discovered this year, when the out-party was at least possibly just as guilty of causing the things that people are upset about as the in-party was. 

That doesn't mean that politicians can't affect events, which then will affect elections -- just as politicians can even affect election results directly by running good candidates and good campaigns (even if the latter only matters around the margins).  So while I'm all for analyzing just why Republicans wound up doing so well in November, and I'm open to the possibility that Congressional strategy or the other things Zelizer identifies were important factors, the real story is that any time someone offers to be that a defeated party will takes years to recover, you want to accept that bet.

Catch of the Day 1 (Palin in 2008)

Jonathan Chait pulls out all the research from political scientists so that I don't have to, to show that, yes, Sarah Palin was almost certainly a drag on John McCain in 2008. 

One thing I'd add to Chait's takedown of Matthew Continetti, who argues that Palin's selection energized the GOP base. The missing piece there is opportunity cost.  Yes, had McCain selected (pro-choice Democrat) Joe Lieberman, the base would have been further demoralized.  But that wasn't a realistic possibility.  No, McCain, who was always eyed suspiciously by conservatives, had little choice but to select someone who conservatives would be happy with.  Indeed, if there was one thing in summer 2008 that was pretty inevitable, it was that as the primaries receded and the prospect of a Barack Obama presidency started to loom large, the conservative base would find some reason to get enthusiastic about the McCain-Whoever ticket.  If it wasn't Palin, it would have been something else. 

And for everyone else, Sarah Palin in 2008 was a clear negative.

You Really Can't Skip Iowa

John McCain is now advising presidential candidates to more-or-less skip Iowa just like he did (well...I should be fair.  He doesn't quite say that he skipped Iowa, or that Iowa doesn't matter at all, but as I read it that's basically his meaning).  Ed Kilgore basically has the goods on why this is a foolish strategy:

McCain might have added that this strategy works best if your main NH rival does run in Iowa, and loses there to an underfunded social conservative who goes on to split the vote against you in South Carolina and Florida. But then that would have involved acknowledging that his 2008 nomination was a crazy three-cushion shot that is unlikely to be replicated in the foreseeable future.

Kilgore, alas, misses one little detail that McCain sort of missed, too, so I have to do this item to correct it: John McCain did campaign in Iowa.  It's true that McCain devoted more resources to New Hampshire, but that's not the same thing as skipping Iowa.  I know someone was tracking campaign days, but I can't find it right now...I did find a useful November 20, 2007 article quoting candidate McCain:

But asked by reporters Monday if he was moving out of Iowa to focus on New Hampshire, McCain answered, "That's not true. We are not moving out of Iowa."

"We are just going to work harder in all three [early voting] states: New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Iowa."

So six weeks before the Iowa caucuses, McCain was denying reports he would pull out of Iowa...which implies that he had a campaign there to fold if he chose.  Indeed, McCain then surged in the Iowa polls, finishing basically in a tie for third with Fred Thompson. 

If McCain hadn't contested Iowa -- if he had really skipped it -- he almost certainly would have finished behind not only Huckabee, Romney, and Thompson, but also behind Ron Paul (who took 9% to McCain and Thompson's 13%).  That's not all!  McCain voters would have gone somewhere else...probably not to Huck, and almost certainly not to Paul or to 6th place finisher Rudy Giuliani.  Odds are they would have gone to some combination of Romney and Thompson.  Would that have affected New Hampshire?  There's no way to know for sure, but I suspect it would have.  McCain won New Hampshire (over Romney) by just five points...it would have taken only a handful of McCain voters thinking he was out of it and switching to Romney or Thompson.  And if McCain narrowly lost New Hampshire, would he have edged Huck in South Carolina later (given that Romney won the next two contests in Michigan and Nevada anyway)? 

Let me go back and make a more basic point.  One of the key reasons that it's important to do well in Iowa is that if you don't, and I'm going to emphasize it because it's important and oddly overlooked sometimes, someone else will.  Suppose that John Edwards had passed on Iowa.  Sure, he wouldn't have wasted his resources finishing third there, but someone else would have finished third, and might well have shifted some of the attention Edwards received in New Hampshire to Richardson, or Dodd, or Biden.  Wouldn't have mattered much on the Democratic side, since the two frontrunners were genuinely strong candidates, but on the GOP side?  Hard to predict.

McCain, in fact, got the best of both worlds  By clearly focusing more on New Hampshire, he was able to get away with finishing relatively far back in Iowa -- without actually finishing all that far back.  In short, what he did extremely well was playing the expectations game.  Given that, a genuinely weak candidate field, and a bit of luck, he was able to survive a weak finish in Iowa.  As Kilgore says, however, it's not something we should expect to see again any time soon.

Oy, Bai

Matt Bai has another fantasy analysis piece.  Brendan Nyhan takes it apart.

The only thing I'd stress a bit more than Nyhan does is a relatively minor, but factual, point.  Bai claims that Barack Obama ran a content-free campaign focused on a vague slogan of "hope" and "change."  Look, I understand that Republicans want to spin things that way, and I certainly understand that most of the inattentive public doesn't pay much attention to the campaign and probably heard little more than "hope" and "change."  But in fact, Obama had lots and lots of very specific campaign proposals -- health care most certainly included -- and he did, in fact, campaign on those proposals.  In fact, it's hard to see how anyone paying even minimal attention to the campaign could believe that

The stimulus bill and the health care law may or may not have been good policy, but the sheer scope and cost of those agenda items seemed to jolt a lot of the independent voters who had conditionally supported Mr. Obama. Having failed to establish a rationale for such expansive measures during the campaign, Democrats were easily caricatured by their adversaries as a bunch of 1970s liberals who would spend money wherever they could. 

Stimulus?  Sure, although as always don't forget that a large chunk of that consisted of the tax cuts that Obama certainly campaigned on.   But health care?  Nonsense.  The "easily caricatured" conclusion has nothing whatsoever to do with anything that happened in the campaign.  And, by the way: all bill are easily caricatured.  (One might argue, although I wouldn't, that Bill Clinton spent more time talking about health care in 1992 did than Barack Obama in 2008 -- did that prevent his plan from being "easily caricatured"?). 

Really, just an awful use of extremely valuable NYT space.  Go read Nyhan for the rest of it. 

Research Alert: 2008 Election

Just a quick item to alert everyone who doesn't regularly read the Monkey Cage (and shame on you!) that John Sides is running a series of items this week highlighting new research on the 2008 election.  First one here: Arthur Lupia throws a little cold water on the idea that new voters decided the election, finding that Bush -> Obama switchers were sufficient to give Obama the presidency.  Original article here (pdf).

One of the things about political science research is that it tends to run on its own timetable, which may or may not be convenient for, well, anyone else.  Not because political scientists lack interest in the real world of contemporary politics, but just because when you are doing research it tends to follow its own logic (not to mention the schedules of the academic year and academic journals).  For example, the thing that I'm working on right now uses data from the Eisenhower to Obama administrations, but what looks as if it's going to be really interesting out of it is about party changes, and their effects on the presidency, in the 1970s and early 1980s.  You may ask: why didn't someone do that study then, when it was happening?  But not only were the data not yet available (one couldn't have known in 1981 if some things were flukes or trends), but my research was inspired by other research that wasn't published in 1981...in fact, there are a couple lines of research that my little piece depends on, and no one could possibly have figured out the piece that I'm working on without the major contributions that preceded me. 

This can be frustrating!  I'm sure people were way more interested in questions about the 2008 election on election night, 2008, when CNN was taking apart the exit polls, at least when it wasn't using that much-missed hologram technology.  Alas, it takes time to get things right.  So if you want to know what really happened in 2008, or at least the latest evidence, go over to the Monkey Cage and hang out with John Sides. Anyway, I'm glad someone has time on his hands today.

Catch a Wave

Eric Massa. 

Enid Greene Waldholtz.


Just saying...

(Someone with a longer memory than mine can probably name someone from the Watergate babies class of '74...if anyone can name one from the 1958 election cycle, I'll be really impressed).

Iron Laws of Politics (Candidate's Spouse Edition)

Back to Heillemann/Halperin: I do have one sort of context-setting thing to add, which is that in all campaigns I've every been involved in and all campaigns I've ever heard about, the staff hate the spouse.  I've heard of campaigns in which the staff liked and respected the candidate and some in which the staff hated and had contempt for the candidate, but as far as I know the staff just about always thinks of every candidate's spouse as a meddling, overbearing, pain-in-the-ass.

That's not to say that the various things attributed to Bill, Cindy, Elizabeth, and the rest in the new book are necessarily wrong...I'd just caution people to understand the context.  If you try to dig for dirt about the candidates' spouses from staff, odds are you'll find it (with an exception for current First Ladies, since the incentives for talking are different.  But dollars to doughnuts Obama's staff found her meddling and overbearing, too).. 

Anyone with campaign experience want to confirm or contradict this one from personal experience?  Comments are open!

Congratulate Yourself...

...if you volunteered recently for a candidate.  New research just published from Seth Masket shows that Obama's field offices did, in fact, have a small but measurable effect on the vote -- enough that it probably swung Florida, North Carolina, and Indiana. You can read more about it at his blog here, where he concludes:

So, for those of you who volunteered insane hours during the campaign and wondered if what you were doing actually made a difference, it did.

What's nice about this research is that it's pretty objective (Obama either did or didn't have a field office).  Most subjective observers of elections tend to see everything through the lens of the final result -- or, during the campaign, by fluctuations in the polls.  So an ad, a debate performance, or a stump speech are judged to be good if the winner gave them.  Objective studies of elections tend, as Seth notes, to have trouble finding any effects. So it's nice that someone was able to document one.  Now, we're talking about one finding, about one kind of campaign effect, in one particular campaign, but it's still nice to know -- and I think most of us are happy that the data fell as they did.  Most of us would rather, I think, live in a world in which that sort of thing can make a difference.

Fighting the Last Battle

The Democrats are, perhaps, going to eliminate superdelegates from the presidential nominating process.  Here's the story from Josh Putnam, with further explanation here.  The basic idea is that superdelegates would still be at the convention, either as nonvoting delegates or, if they want, as pledged delegates, allocated along with regular pledged delegates.  Basically, after a state's primary, a superdelegate could choose to pledge to a candidate who was entitled to delegates,  and thereby take one of that candidate's pledged delegate spots.

I think the whole thing is a solution in search of a problem.  Here's the deal: in most cycles, the nomination process produces a winner by acclamation, and it doesn't really matter whether or not superdelegates exist or what they do. So what we're talking about is very close contests.

Now, it turns out that there are a few dirty little secrets about the nomination process.  First of all, while Democrats like to talk about control by voters, in fact primary voters are apt to follow opinion leaders within the party.  Why?  Because there's very little to distinguish same-party candidates, and so rank-and-file voters have little but reputation and image to choose from -- and reputation and image are heavily influenced by what trusted opinion leaders say.  That's why endorsements are so important within the process.  Therefore, it's silly to think of superdelegates as a violation of a principle of popular control of the nomination; in reality, what voters do is mostly a function of what party leaders want. (At the same time, I've argued that there's another effect in which party leaders react to what happens in the early primaries, so it's not true in my opinion that ordinary voters have no independent effect).

OK, another dirty little secret: the process, as it's evolved, is heavily dependent on winnowing to a single candidate.  The rules to deal with very close contests are untested, and if the 2008 case is any indication, the rules probably don't work very well.  The basic idea of winning shares of the nomination through proportional representation in primaries and caucuses is fine, but in case it doesn't produce a winner, the role of actual people -- pledged delegates, who are slated by the candidates and therefore have as their only qualification their intense fanatical devotion to the candidate -- is really not likely to work out very well.  Thus the political junkie fantasy of a deadlocked process leading to a brokered convention is a fantasy; the only "brokers" in such a process would be the candidates themselves, because the delegates are chosen to be candidate loyalists, not representatives of party interests or factions.

Given all of this, superdelegates play a useful role -- not in representing "the party" against "the people," but in potentially resolving near-tie contests by shifting to the narrow winner.  That was in fact tested in 2008, and it worked pretty smoothly.  Barack Obama's supporters turned against superdelegates because the early-declaring supers supported Hillary Clinton, but as Obama racked up wins in primaries and caucuses, the undeclared supers moved to Obama, and eventually supers originally pledged to Clinton switched,  Without the supers, Obama's margin would have stayed slim, and Clinton's supporters would have had an even larger incentive to fight it out to the convention.  The supers role, that is, turns out to be to ratify -- not to chose -- the winner.  It's a useful function.

Now, the reform proposal will have the opposite effect.  Most pledged delegates are, as I said, fanatically attached to their candidate (because that's the sole criterion for slating them).  Unless the final margin in a close contest is very, very close, there's no reason to hope that enough delegates can be turned to make a difference.  But pledged supers, the category the Dems are thinking of creating, would be different.  They would be much more susceptible to being swayed.  With pledged supers, close losers are going to be more likely to stick around to the bitter end.

You'll notice that I assume that the "pledge" part of pledged delegates isn't actually worth much.  I think that's correct: the convention is the ultimate arbiter of party rules, and should delegates want to free themselves from their pledges and they have a majority at the convention, I don't think anyone can stop them from doing so.  Although a bitter convention decided by disloyal delegates might wind up in the courts, and almost certainly, lawsuit or not, be a total disaster for the party's chances in November.

Superdelegates have been a useful part of the nomination process for twenty-five years.  They worked well, ultimately in Obama's favor, in 2008, the year in which they received their biggest test.  Democrats should ditch this part of the reform effort, and keep the current role of the supers.