THE YEAR OF THE SUPERS

With Hillary Clinton winning primaries in Texas and Ohio Tuesday but Barack Obama remaining ahead in the delegate count, it looks as if the superdelegates will determine which candidate is the Democratic presidential nominee.

So far, with the Democratic elected-delegate count closely divided and with Sen. Obama in the lead, many of his supporters insist that the superdelegates must echo that edge and vote for him. A few declare that they will switch parties if Sen. Clinton wins the nomination and either stay home or even vote for John McCain or Ralph Nader. (Would they still demand an “echo” vote by the supers if Sen. Clinton should get an edge in the delegate count?)

Most Americans paid no attention to the superdelegates until they took center stage in this presidential race. Many reject the entire institution of superdelegates. Many simply want them to hand the Democratic nomination to their favored candidate.

The superdelegate system started and continued in force because of a string of Democratic defeats – George McGovern’s in 1972, Jimmy Carter’s in 1980, Walter Mondale’s in 1984, Michael Dukakis’ in 1988, Al Gore’s narrow defeat (assured by the Supreme Court) in 2000, and John Kerry’s in 2004. Sure, the superdelegates haven’t always picked winners, but the thinking has often been that a special group of Democratic old hands could do better than voters at primaries and caucuses.

So a special commission headed by Gov. James Hunt of North Carolina created the superdelegates, who are elected and party officials, members of the Democratic National Committee, Democratic members of the Senate and House, Democratic governors, former presidents and some other party regulars. Originally they were 14 percent of all Democatic delegates. Later, the number was increased to about 20 percent. It now stands at 796 delegates.

The superdelegates are “free agents, able to switch their endorsements or commitments at any time,” in the words of Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute in a Feb. 15 op-ed page article in The New York Times. They expressed the hope that the superdelegates could help the party avoid a complex credential battle and the real possibility of an “explosive convention where, in the end, half the delegates (and half the party) feels they have been cheated.”

Is the superdelegate system anti-democratic if it bypasses the verdict of the caucuses and the primaries? Not necessarily. The caucuses are by their nature small and largely limited to party activists. And some of the primaries are biased by the votes of independents and crossover voting by Republicans who want to help nominate what they see as the weaker Democrat.

The superdelegates should consider the will of the voters, but in the end they must exercise their independent judgment and vote for the one they think can best win in November and – more important but rarely mentioned – the one they believe would be the better president.