The Democrats’ Undemocratic System
(TWP) - The wonder, really, is that the nomination train wreck confronting the Democratic Party didn’t happen years earlier.
The stage was set for the current stalemate over five marathon days of negotiations in June 1988. In the fifth-floor conference room of a Washington law firm, representatives of Michael Dukakis, the party’s nominee, and Jesse Jackson, his unsuccessful challenger, hashed out a new set of delegate selection rules.
Jackson felt aggrieved that he had not amassed as many delegates as his popular vote total would have suggested. In the 1984 primary campaign, for instance, Jackson won 19 percent of the popular vote but received just 10 percent of the delegates. So Jackson’s rules guru, Harold M. Ickes, insisted on adopting proportional representation rules that would award insurgent candidates a bigger share of delegates in future contests.
Twenty years later, the rules Ickes advocated seem to be working against his current candidate, Hillary Clinton, reducing the impact of her wins in delegate-rich states such as California, New York and New Jersey. But Clinton could be saved by an unintended consequence of the move to proportional representation: Because the system tends to produce a stalemate between two strong candidates, it ends up supersizing the role of party pooh-bahs known as superdelegates.
All this was predicted long ago by Tad Devine, the Democratic Party operative who represented Dukakis in the rules negotiations. In a prescient 1991 article, Devine and Anthony Corrado explained the paradox:
“The move to strict proportional representation, which was adopted to ensure that delegate outcomes would better reflect the will of the electorate,” they wrote, may instead “have produced a system in which party leaders and elected officials will hold the balance of power in determining the outcome of nomination contests.”
In short, the Democratic Party has come up with a characteristically muddled method of choosing presidential nominees, with rules that are simultaneously overly and inadequately democratic.
The overly democratic part involves ultimately giving too much weight to the losing candidate’s vote. Under the rules, three-fourths of the pledged delegates are allocated by congressional district, the remaining one-quarter according to the vote statewide.
This leads to bizarre “everybody wins” results in the many congressional districts that have an even number of delegates. As a result, campaigns devote inordinate resources to districts that happen to have an odd number of delegates.
Consider a four-delegate district. For a candidate in a two-person contest to get three of the four, he would have to win a daunting 62.5 percent of the vote. The more likely outcome is that the winner and loser get two delegates each.
To obtain more than a one-delegate edge in a five-delegate district, the winning candidate would have to take 70 percent of the vote. The upshot: In a close race, it’s extraordinarily difficult for one candidate to get very far ahead of the other.
The impact of this was clear in California, the biggest delegate prize. Clinton won43 of the state’s 53 congressional districts, and 52 percent of the popular vote to Obama’s 42 percent. But under the proportional representation rules, and with 32 of the districts offering an even number of delegates, she received 207 delegates to Obama’s 163. Had Democrats used the Republicans’ formula in California — with delegates awarded on a winner-takes-all basis by congressional district and statewide — Clinton would have received 316 delegates, Obama just 54.
It’s not that one system is demonstrably right and the other obviously wrong. The preponderant Republican method arguably gives too much of an advantage to the dominant candidate, the Democratic approach too little.
But the inherent flaws in the Democrats’ system are exacerbated by the inadequately democratic institution of superdelegates, the elected officials, members of the Democratic National Committee and other party luminaries who can choose according to their own preference.
It’s not unreasonable to carve out a special role for party leaders. The idea of superdelegates, introduced in 1982, was to invest elected officials in the eventual nominee and prevent the party from veering too far off course in its selection (see: George McGovern in 1972).
But the number of superdelegates — 796, or 19 percent of all delegates — combined with proportional representation creates a potentially toxic interaction.
As Devine and Corrado explained in 1991, “the primary consequences of the move to proportional representation is that the superdelegates now stand as the only bloc of delegates in which it may be possible to build an extraordinary delegate margin.”
As intended, superdelegates gave a boost to Walter Mondale over Gary Hart in 1984; they helped cement Dukakis’s lead in 1988. But there is a difference between bringing closure and determining outcomes. Once the nominee is selected, whenever that may be, the party needs to reassess rules that are shaping up to be bad for both Democrats and democracy.
Vote early, vote often. That’s my motto.
A Flawed Feminist Test
WASHINGTON -(NYT) - Russell Berman, a young reporter for The New York Sun, trailed Bill Clinton around Maryland all day Sunday. The former president was on his best behavior, irritating the smattering of press.
Elaine Sirkis, 77, an Obama supporter, confided that she just isn’t sure she’s ready for a woman president. Betty Conway, 83, a Hillary supporter, confided that she just isn’t sure she’s ready for a black president.
As Conway walked away, Sirkis smiled sheepishly. “I’m sorry,” she told Berman sweetly about her friend. “She’s a bigot.”
We’re not just in the most vertiginous election of our lives. We’re in another national seminar on gender and race that is teaching us about who we are as we figure out what we want America to be.
It’s not yet clear which prejudice will infect the presidential contest more — misogyny or racism.
Many women I talk to, even those who aren’t particularly fond of Hillary, feel empathy for her, knowing that any woman in a world dominated by men has to walk a tightrope between femininity and masculinity, strength and vulnerability.
They see double standards they hate — when male reporters described Hillary’s laugh as “a cackle” or her voice as “grating,” when Rush Limbaugh goes off on her wrinkles or when male pundits seem gleeful to write her political obituary. Several women I know, who argue with their husbands about Hillary, refer with a shudder to the “Kill the Witch” syndrome.
In a webcast, prestidigitator Penn Jillette talks about a joke he has begun telling in his show. He thinks the thunderous reaction it gets from audiences shows that Hillary no longer has a shot.
The joke goes: “Obama is just creaming Hillary. You know, all these primaries, you know. And Hillary says it’s not fair, because they’re being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there’s no White Bitch Month.”
Of course, jokes like that — even Jillette admits it’s offensive — are exactly what may give Hillary a shot. When the usually invulnerable Hillary seems vulnerable, many women, even ones who don’t want her to win, cringe at the idea of seeing her publicly humiliated — again.
And since women — and some men — tend to be more protective when she is down, it is impossible to rule out a rally, especially if voters start to see Obama, after his eight-contest rout, as that maddening archetypal figure: the glib golden boy who slides through on charm and a smile.
Those close to Hillary say she’s feeling blue. It’s an unbearable twist of fate to spend all those years in the shadow of one Secretariat, only to have another gallop past while you’re plodding toward the finish line.
I know that the attacks against powerful women can be harsh and personal and unfair, enough to make anyone cry.
But Hillary is not the best test case for women. We’ll never know how much of the backlash is because she’s a woman or because she’s this woman or because of the ick factor of returning to the old Clinton dysfunction.
While Obama aims to transcend race, Hillary often aims to use gender to her advantage, or to excuse mistakes. In 1994, after her intransigence and secrecy-doomed health care plan, she told The Wall Street Journal that she was “a gender Rorschach test.”
“If somebody has a female boss for the first time, and they’ve never experienced that,” she said, “well, maybe they can’t take out their hostility against her so they turn it on me.”
As a possible first Madame President, Hillary is a flawed science experiment because you can’t take Bill out of the equation. Her story is wrapped up in her marriage, and her marriage is wrapped up in a series of unappetizing compromises, arrangements and dependencies.
Instead of carving out a separate identity for herself, she has become more entwined with Bill. She is running bolstered by his record and his muscle. She touts her experience as first lady, even though her judgment during those years on issue after issue was poor. She says she’s learned from her mistakes, but that’s not a compelling pitch.
As a senator, she was not a leading voice on important issues, and her Iraq vote was about her political viability.
She told New York magazine’s John Heilemann that before Iowa taught her that she had to show her soft side, “I really believed I had to prove in this race from the very beginning that a woman could be president and a woman could be commander in chief. I thought that was my primary mission.”
If Hillary fails, it will be her failure, not ours.
Amen, brothers and sisters!
Diabetes Study Partially Halted After Deaths
Among the study participants who were randomly assigned to get their blood sugar levels to nearly normal, there were 54 more deaths than in the group whose levels were less rigidly controlled. The patients were in the study for an average of four years when investigators called a halt to the intensive blood sugar lowering and put all of them on the less intense regimen.
The results do not mean blood sugar is meaningless. Lowered blood sugar can protect against kidney disease, blindness and amputations, but the findings inject an element of uncertainty into what has been dogma — that the lower the blood sugar the better and that lowering blood sugar levels to normal saves lives.
Medical experts were stunned.
“It’s confusing and disturbing that this happened,” said Dr. James Dove, president of the American College of Cardiology. “For 50 years, we’ve talked about getting blood sugar very low. Everything in the literature would suggest this is the right thing to do,” he added.
Dr. Irl Hirsch, a diabetes researcher at the University of Washington, said the study’s results would be hard to explain to some patients who have spent years and made an enormous effort, through diet and medication, getting and keeping their blood sugar down. They will not want to relax their vigilance, he said.
“It will be similar to what many women felt when they heard the news about estrogen,” Dr. Hirsch said. “Telling these patients to get their blood sugar up will be very difficult.”
Dr. Hirsch added that organizations like the American Diabetes Association would be in a quandary. Its guidelines call for blood sugar targets as close to normal as possible.
And some insurance companies pay doctors extra if their diabetic patients get their levels very low. (My emphasis.)
The low-blood-sugar hypothesis was so entrenched that when the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases proposed the study in the 1990s, they explained that it would be ethical. Even though most people assumed that lower blood sugar was better, no one had rigorously tested the idea. So the study would ask if very low blood sugar levels in people with Type 2 diabetes — the form that affects 95 percent of people with the disease — would protect against heart disease and save lives.
Some said that the study, even if ethical, would be impossible. They doubted that participants — whose average age was 62, who had had diabetes for about 10 years, who had higher than average blood sugar levels, and who also had heart disease or had other conditions, like high blood pressure and high cholesterol, that placed them at additional risk of heart disease — would ever achieve such low blood sugar levels.
Study patients were randomly assigned to one of three types of treatments: one comparing intensity of blood sugar control; another comparing intensity of cholesterol control; and the third comparing intensity of blood pressure control. The cholesterol and blood pressure parts of the study are continuing.
Dr. John Buse, the vice-chairman of the study’s steering committee and the president of medicine and science at the American Diabetes Association, described what was required to get blood sugar levels low, as measured by a protein, hemoglobin A1C, which was supposed to be at 6 percent or less.
“Many were taking four or five shots of insulin a day,” he said. “Some were using insulin pumps. Some were monitoring their blood sugar seven or eight times a day.”
They also took pills to lower their blood sugar, in addition to the pills they took for other medical conditions and to lower their blood pressure and cholesterol. They also came to a medical clinic every two months and had frequent telephone conversations with clinic staff.
Those assigned to the less stringent blood sugar control, an A1C level of 7.0 to 7.9 percent, had an easier time of it. They measured their blood sugar once or twice a day, went to the clinic every four months and took fewer drugs or lower doses.
So it was quite a surprise when the patients who had worked so hard to get their blood sugar low had a significantly higher death rate, the study investigators said.
The researchers asked whether there were any drugs or drug combinations that might have been to blame. They found none, said Dr. Denise G. Simons-Morton, a project officer for the study at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Even the drug Avandia, suspected of increasing the risk of heart attacks in diabetes, did not appear to contribute to the increased death rate.
Nor was there an unusual cause of death in the intensively treated group, Dr. Simons-Morton said. Most of the deaths in both groups were from heart attacks, she added.
For now, the reasons for the higher death rate are up for speculation. Clearly, people without diabetes are different from people who have diabetes and get their blood sugar low.
It might be that patients suffered unintended consequences from taking so many drugs, which might interact in unexpected ways, said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic.
Or it may be that participants reduced their blood sugar too fast, Dr. Hirsch said. Years ago, researchers discovered that lowering blood sugar very quickly in diabetes could actually worsen blood vessel disease in the eyes, he said. But reducing levels more slowly protected those blood vessels.
And there are troubling questions about what the study means for people who are younger and who do not have cardiovascular disease. Should they forgo the low blood sugar targets?
No one knows.
Other medical experts say that they will be discussing and debating the results for some time.
“It is a great study and very well run,” Dr. Dove said. “And it certainly had the right principles behind it.”
But maybe, he said, “there may be some scientific principles that don’t hold water in a diabetic population.”
I can’t stand it - you who respond need to vent - I’m all tuckered out.
