Maryland’s Democratic Delegate Math According to CNN, as of today, Barack Obama leads Hillary Clinton by 139 delegates in the race for the Democratic Party nomination. Only real political junkies can explain how the Democratic Party apportions its delegates; but the net effect of this arcane process is that if Obama and Hillary continue to split the remaining primaries, Obama will still lead in the number of committed delegates when the voting is all done. He is also likely to continue his lead in the national popular vote and will have won more states than Hillary.

That’s why the focus is on the Party’s “super delegates” and how they will vote. Clinton says that each super delegate needs to make his or her own judgment and vote for the candidate who can win in November. Obama says super delegates should follow the popular will of democratic voters in the primaries and vote for the candidate who has won the most delegates.

After the primary election in 1980 when Ted Kennedy tried to pry away delegates committed to Jimmy Carter, the Party created the Hunt Commission to come up with new rules to govern how delegates elected in primaries or caucuses should vote. Rather than requiring elected delegates to be bound to a particular candidate, the guidelines were loosened to require elected delegates pledged to a particular candidate to vote for that candidate “in good conscience”. But Members of Congress still complained that they didn’t have enough say in the party nominating process; so the Hunt Commission created the concept of super delegates. Like the old soviet politburo, party officials were given a special role in the nominating process. The concept was that by virtue of their exquisite political sensibilities, elected officials would be best able to respond to “changing circumstances" and exercise their judgment to pick the best nominee.

Since then, the primary process has served up the nominee without controversy, and the judgment of super delegates hasn’t been put to the test. Though in retrospect, the savvier of them might have saved the Party from the Dukakis debacle of 1988.

It is pretty clear from reading the Hunt Commission report that super delegates were created precisely to deal with a situation like that Party is facing today. Jim Hunt, the eponymous chair of the Commission said that elected officials could serve a role choosing the Party’s nominee by making a “reasoned choice" when the will of the voters is not clear.

What is at stake is the meaning of "reasoned choice". If “reasoned choice” means responding to “changing circumstances”, then it is hard to see what circumstances would require super delegates to reverse the vote of Democratic Party voters.

The case for following the will of the voters is especially compelling here in Maryland. Super delegates would be hard pressed to give a reasoned explanation as to why they should allow Hillary to win a majority of their votes after Obama won Maryland’s democratic primary by a super margin of 25 percentage points (61% to 36%). Obama won 27 delegates to Clinton’s 19. Yet by one count, of the 27 Super Delegates in Maryland, ten are committed to Clinton and only four are committed to Obama; 13 remain undecided. For Obama to equal his margin of victory in the primary, he would need to get a total of 16 super delegates. To do that, he would need 12 of the remaining 13 uncommitted delegates, or get some committed to Hillary to switch their allegiance.

The Hunt Commission gave the super delegates the ability to exercise discretion. But absent a compelling reason, Maryland’s super delegates ought to reinforce the will as expressed by the voters in last month’s primary and cast their votes for Obama.  9:47 AM •