Oligarchy!

[UPDATED]
If you can't win an election outright, then buying it is the next best thing. And if you can't buy it on the up and up, you don't have much choice but to go underhanded. Greg Sargent at TPM Election Central had a letter to Nancy Pelosi from Clinton contributors essentially saying that it's a nice Democratically controlled House she has there, and it would be a pity if anything happened to it. Pelosi had earlier suggested that superdelegates should follow the will of their constituents and reflect the popular vote. Needless to say, the letter has been getting quite a bit of comment around the Web.

As it happens, I tend to agree with that position on superdelegates. If all they're going to do is rubber stamp the popular vote, what's the point in having them? Superdelegates, usually office holders but also party officials, have their own points of view, and they should vote however they feel they should. But there's no need to introduce extortion into the mix.

What I find most striking about this situation is the idea that the superdelegates are some monolithic block that would all vote for Clinton if given half a chance. I've written about this already, but I still maintain that superdelegates who desperately want to support Hillary are already committed to Hillary. And many superdelegates are also congressional representatives, who I'm sure are thrilled to be on the receiving end of such a threat.

UPDATE--Ah, the perils of posting a couple of hours after you've already gone to sleep. I've cleaned this up a little bit from some of its previous sloppiness (that also points out the perils of spell-check--parts of the post may not have made complete sense, and the words chosen may not always have been entirely appropriate, but there wasn't a misspelling to be had in the entire piece). I've got more to say on this subject, which I'll try to get to later today or tonight.