Super Delegates’ Role Thrust into Public Eye

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• JIM LEHRER:

  And, finally tonight, who exactly are the super delegates? Judy Woodruff explains.

• JUDY WOODRUFF:

  The Democratic Party could be entering uncharted territory as it moves toward nominating a presidential candidate.

  If Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton remain as close as they are now in the number of pledged convention delegates earned, decisions by the party's super delegates — 796 of them — ultimately could decide who the nominee will be.

  For some perspective on the role of the super delegates, we turn to Tony Corrado. He's professor of government at Colby College, and he's a member of the American Bar Association's Election Law Advisory Board.

  Professor Corrado, thank you for being with us. First of all, remind us, who are these super delegates?

• TONY CORRADO, Colby College:

  The super delegates are the party leaders and elected officials of the Democratic Party. They include the United States senators, members of Congress, governors, members of the Democratic National Committee, and the state chairs and vice chairs.

  And they have a status as automatic delegates to the convention, where they can go to the convention without having to pledge to a particular candidate.

• JUDY WOODRUFF:

  You can't really talk about them without looking back a couple of decades at what happened, what, in the late '60s, in the '70s, that led to the creation of these super delegates. In a nutshell, bring us up to speed on that.

• TONY CORRADO:

  Well, basically what happened, Judy, was the reforms of the 1970s that the Democrats adopted after their tumultuous 1968 convention led to a system where basically delegates were elected by pledging to a candidate, and then they were elected in primaries and caucuses.

  The problem with that system was that many party leaders, many members of Congress, many state chairmen, didn't want to really pledge to one candidate or another. They felt they had an obligation to remain neutral. So as a result, they weren't getting to the convention.

  In fact, in 1976 and 1980, less than 20 percent of the congressmen were able to go as delegates to the convention. And one out of four governors couldn't get to the convention as delegates.

  So the party felt they needed to change the rules to allow their elected officials to be able to attend the convention without having to have pledged early on to a candidate.