The corporate Democratic position on "superdelegates" in the Presidential nominating convention

TYT Politics' Emma Vigeland interviewed Elaine Karmarck of the Demcoratic National Committee's Unity Reform Commission this past week on the issue. DNC Unity Member LOVES Superdelegates! 10/20/2017:

Emma is young, so maybe that partially accounts for the condescending tone Karmarck takes in her responses. But that also seems to be the general attitude that corporate Democratic leaders tend to take in addressing anything on the progressive agenda. Karmarck tells her, starting after 1:50 when Emma asks why superdelegates haven't been abolished:

Because, when people sit down and think about it, they realize that if you want your Democratic President to be effective, you want that President to be somebody that the members of the House and the members of the Senate and the Governors, and the party members, can work with.

And that it's not just about elections, it's about governing. We are one party. And the way the Constitution was set up, you need the President and the Congress getting together. All you need to do to understand how important this is, is to look at what's happened to President Trump.

Some takeaways from that. One is to remember that the corporate Democratic line presently is that Bernie Sanders isn't a "real" Democrat because he is elected to the Senate as an Independent. Another is that, actually, the Constitution sets up the Executive and the Legislative branches as separate from each other. It was part of a "checks and balances" arrangement that was consciously meant to preclude the kind of dependence of the Executive on majority coalitions in the Legislature that occurs in parliamentary systems. And, third, there were no political parties in the present-day sense when the Constitution was written and ratified, although their development was well on its way a decade later. IN other words, that a silly TINA (There Is No Alternative) kind of argument.

Emma does a good job of teasing out a further explanation of the suggestion in Karmarck's last sentence that Trump and Bernie are some kind of mirror-image of each other:

Emma: So do you think the elimination of the superdelegate process would lead to a Trump on the Democratic Party side?

Karmarck: I think that the entire political system has become vulnerable to people like Trump who have no business being President of the United States, by virtue of experience and, more importantly, by virtue of temperament.

And that we have opened ourselves up to a very dangerous situation where, basically, kind of charismatic people can capture a political system even when the other actors in that system know full well that person is not capable of being President. But it doesn't mean it won't happen to the Democrats, okay?

We are now led by a person who is unstable and not fit for office. ...

What the superdelegates tell you is what they think of the people running for President. And you have to listen to them for one reason: they actually know them. Okay? The voters don't actually know them. The voters can be fooled, as many Republicans were fooled by Donald Trump and they now regret it, okay?

So you want in the process, you want somebody who actually knows the candidates and can evaluate them on the basis of their ability to govern. So look at it this way. You would not go to a neurosurgeon who was not validated by other neurosurgeons, right? You would not get an electrician who wasn't accepted by other electricians. This is a very important office, and we are choosing somebody with no input from other people who govern?

That what she said. She doesn't seem to think much of the whole Jeffersonian democracy thing. (Or Jacksonian, or Lincolnian, or Rooseveltian, etc.)

Shoot, she sounds like she doesn't much approve of this whole having primaries for the Presidential candidate thing. Heck, why bother when the DNC could just poll the biggest donors elected Dems on who would be most convenient for the One Percent have the greatest "ability to govern."

I could have made a more democratic-sounding case for the superdelegates system. And I don't much like it.

Also, I generally assume that people who constantly follow up their statements with "okay?" and "right?" and talk about "what you want is" are generally trying to intimidate others from disagreeing with them.