Super-delegates get campaign cash?
I read this article (quoted below with a link to the original posted website) that says the Super-delegates get campaign cash from the presidential candidates coffers. I don’t know about you but I find this point to be more than a little disconcerting. I mean they are essentially “buying” someone’s vote. Something we as a nation as SUPPOSED to be against. Don’t worry, I know it happens to a much smaller degree all the time but when you have people paying out such large sums of money to people to can change the tide of elections with a SINGLE vote… that’s a problem. Also notice this quoted section of the article:
Obama’s political action committee has doled out more than $694,000 to superdelegates since 2005, the study found, and of the 81 who had announced their support for Obama, 34 had received donations totaling $228,000.
If my memory serves me correctly, wasn’t Obama “on the fence” about running for president during that time? Now it seems like he was on the fence because he was looking to garner enough support from the super-delegates as an insurance policy against the possible close race between himself and another Democrat. He spent an awful lot of money wooing the super-delegates long before he committed to running for president. Maybe I’m naive and this is normal practice and nothing about it is wrong. Well, it may be “normal practice” but some how it just doesn’t seem like a fair way to go about winning an election. I know that long ago the way our leaders were ‘elected’ was set in place…. the delegates and the electoral college were implemented to balance the voting between less populated states vs larger populated states as well as accounting for the “less educated” people of the interior states. Sound like a control issue to me even back then. Be that as it may, those arguments are antiquated and our systems needs to be changed to all popular voting, pure and simple.
Superdelegates get campaign cash
Posted by Foon Rhee, deputy national political editor February 14, 2008 03:54 PM
Many of the superdelegates who could well decide the Democratic presidential nominee have already been plied with campaign contributions by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a new study shows.”While it would be unseemly for the candidates to hand out thousands of dollars to primary voters, or to the delegates pledged to represent the will of those voters, elected officials serving as superdelegates have received about $890,000 from Obama and Clinton in the form of campaign contributions over the last three years,” the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics reported today.About half the 800 superdelegates — elected officials, party leaders, and others — have committed to either Clinton or Obama, though they can change their minds until the convention.Obama’s political action committee has doled out more than $694,000 to superdelegates since 2005, the study found, and of the 81 who had announced their support for Obama, 34 had received donations totaling $228,000.Clinton’s political action committee has distributed about $195,000 to superdelegates, and only 13 of the 109 who had announced for her have received money, totaling about $95,000.
