Count the delegates, if you can

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By Ian Sherr

SAN FRANCISCO — EDITORIAL — Just when I thought I had figured out why the Democratic Party has superdelegates, Nancy Pelosi comes along and says I have got it all backward.

“The superdelegates were established to give many more people at the grassroots level the opportunity to go to the convention and be really the overwhelming majority of who will decide this convention,” the House Speaker told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last Thursday.

With a straight face.

That was after Super Tuesday, which was supposed to decide the next Democratic nominee. Instead, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have battled themselves to a delegate draw that party elders may have to settle.

I don’t know what’s worse – Pelosi pretending that rank-and-file Democrats will get to decide anything this year, or the convoluted system created to ensure they would not. It was adopted in 1976, to reformulate the reforms of 1972, which came in response to the chaos of 1968, when the Democrats tore themselves apart in the streets of Chicago after convention delegates chose Hubert Humphrey, who had never won a primary that year.

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