Will Super Delegates trump the Dean Machine?

[markus]

I've dropped this little stink bomb into a couple of other threads, but it hasn't caught fire yet. However, this is a critical issue that everyone--Dean, Clark, Kerry, or Other--needs to be thinnking about as we lurch toward the early primaries and caucuses.

I started this discussion earlier in another thread, but it's now three pages doesn in GD.

Forty percent of the delegates to the convention are already "selected", and their intentions are unknown. Many are in Congress and would be as likely to support Gephardt or Kerry. Others are party officials. Remember that stirring reception Dean received at the DNC annual meeting last year? These people don't like insurgent outsiders.

Both the elected officials and party nomenklatura are going to ahve a problem with an "insurgent" candidate like Dean, who threatens their own power base. In fact, Super Delegates were created specifically to give our own nomenklatura veto power over voter selected delegates.

Here's an inteseting article on the subject, still up at MSNBC. http://www.msnbc.com/news/912997.asp

Now, the interesting question: Dean shows up with less than 50% of the delegates. This is virtually guaranteed, as 40% already selected and have good reason to dislike Dean or feel threatened by him.

I really think this is the Clinton/Clark strategy (Bill's not Hillary's; she wouldn't like waiting until 20012 to run). Get the super delegates behind the highly electable and mallable Clark.

We get a Clintonesque Democrat. We get gid of Bush. Life is wonderful. We ship all our jobs to India and Malaysia, and we all sell insurance and cell phones to each other from kiosks at Wall Mart. Ok, the last part is a bit wild, but not far off the truth.

Unless Dean is aggresively courting the super delegates, and getting public commitments from national committee men and women and other party sorts, he is in danger of not winning the nomination no matter how well he does in the run up to the convention.