On the evening that George McGovern was nominated for the presidency by the Democratic Party in 1972, I stayed up until about 1:30 a.m. EDT to see and hear his acceptance speech on television. (Why so late? Because a representative of every single identity group that had supported him for the nomination insisted on getting podium time before he would speak. That was only the first disaster of that ever so badly run campaign. But that's another story.) Sen. McGovern gave a brilliant speech on a) the necessity of getting the U.S. out of Vietnam with all deliberate speed and b) on the necessity of returning to traditional American values after four years of Nixon. (Sound familiar?)

Full disclosure: I have been partial to Sen. McGovern for many years, not in the least because he was kind enough to write the Foreword for my first political book, The New Americanism: How the Democratic Party Can Win the Presidency, Port Jefferson, NY: The Thomas Jefferson Press (further full disclosure: wholly owned by yours truly).

Sen. McGovern had won the nomination in a bitter primary fight with Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey received more popular votes overall, but McGovern won more delegates. And so the nomination was his (sound familiar?), and so also what eventually became the superdelegate system was born. A major reason that McGovern was able to beat Humphrey was that in 1968, when the latter was the Democratic candidate following the withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson, Humphrey refused to commit to ending the war. Apparently he had wanted to do that in the waning days of the campaign against Nixon and his then-new "Southern Strategy" (which will be trotted out once again in redesigned racist clothing by the Republicans this year). However, Johnson refused to give him the go-ahead and Humphrey, even though he was the candidate and Johnson was through politically, was too scared of him to do it anyway.

A stark picture presented on the TV screen the night of the McGovern speech was of the leadership of the Democratic Right, led by Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Senator from Boeing (ooops, I mean Washington), standing in balcony seats, arms folded across their collective chests, simply scowling whenever the cameras picked them up while McGovern was speaking. And Humphrey, he who had led the first major pro-civil rights battles within the Democratic Party and who had sponsored for years the "Humphrey-Hawkins" full employment bill, meekly stood there with them. It was that group that formed the core of what eventually became the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council (yes, Virginia, that DLC, which is still around), of which Bill Clinton was the most prominent leader, before he was elected president. They, of course, did absolutely nothing to help McGovern.

In 1976, after Watergate and the Democratic takeover of the Congress in 1974, somehow the Democrats had no strong candidates for the presidency. And into that vacuum stepped Jimmy Carter (would that he had been as strong then as he is now). Sensing that he might not be the strongest candidate (actually he began with a 30 point lead over President Ford -- it shrank to about 1.5 on Election Day), with the McGovern wing in total disarray after the disastrous defeat in 1972, the Jackson wing wanted to put up Humphrey again. He probably would have won the nomination, but he had developed bladder cancer and obviously could not run again.

After the Carter defeat in 1980, the Democratic Right determined that they would take control of the Party and they designed their means of doing that. The superdelegate system would ensure that the "party bosses" would once again gain control of the nominating process, "smoke-filled" rooms or no. The Clintons, or at least Bill in the 1980s, were at the center of this process. The superdelegates were put in place to make sure that the party's Right, embodied in the DLC, would be in control of the nominating process for the foreseeable future. How ironic, then, that that foreseeable future came to an end in 2008. The other Clinton essentially lost the nomination process because she could not win over the superdelegates, no matter how hard she tried. And boy, did she try, as has been told on BuzzFlash and major other journals for some months now.

If the system had worked as originally designed, Obama, representing what is now the Party's center (only Dennis Kucinich and, to a certain extent, John Edwards represented its Left) would have won a slim majority of elected delegates. But Clinton, representing the right wing of the Party, would have gotten the majority of the superdelegates and with it, the nomination.

One final irony. Humphrey lost the presidency in 1968 most importantly because he never came out in full throat against the Vietnam War, pledging to end American involvement in it, just the way that Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican no less, had won in 1952 by wholeheartedly pledging to end American involvement in the Korean War. The principal reason why Humphrey lost the nomination to a hitherto rather obscure Senator from a tiny state was because of that failure four years earlier. In the case of Clinton, it is likely that history will record that of all the factors that lead to her defeat [1], the single most important was her refusal to repudiate her "yes" vote to authorize the Georgite War on Iraq.

Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY), a weekly Contributing Author for the Web zine The Political Junkies.net [2]; a Special Contributing Editor for Cyrano's Journal Online; and an invited contributor to the Web log The Daily Scare [3].

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