It's standing room only at CLU forum on elections

Super delegates, primary elections without winners and delegate-credential challenges are not normally terms heard bandied about on college campuses, but the 2008 presidential race brought a standing-room-only crowd into a California Lutheran University meeting room Tuesday to hear about those topics.

The school's political science professors held a forum with students to mull over the first presidential election without incumbents or obvious early frontrunners in generations.

And, some said, the current confusion over super delegates may only be the beginning of a crash course for the nation's voters as the Democratic Party increasingly looks to be deadlocked.

In the latest batch of election results Tuesday night, Sen. Barack Obama bested Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in primaries in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia.

"Old medieval maps used to have blank spaces marked Thar be dragons,'" said professor Herb Gooch. "Keep your eye on the fact that Hillary and Barack have about the same number of delegates."

The last Democratic party primary will be June 6 in Puerto Rico, "and for some reason the party has given them 63 delegates, but that's a place where local party leaders allocate delegates under mysterious criteria. You couldn't write a better screenplay," Gooch said.

On the Republican side, the GOP's conservative wing has a level of dissatisfaction with frontrunner Sen. John McCain that was noted even as the news of the Arizona senator's victory in Tuesday's primaries came in.

"McCain's mother said it best: The Republican leadership is going to have to hold its nose and make him the nominee, because the people have spoken," said Haco Hoang, a CLU professor of political science.

Students expressed curiosity about the Democratic Party's 796 super delegates — elected officials and party leaders who automatically get a vote at the Democratic nominating convention. That party rule did not seem very democratic to some in the room.

But professors said they expect the super delegates to start a stampede to the most-popular candidate at a safe point after a leader emerges.

"At the end of the day, all of these super delegates are politicians, and they want to be on the winning team," said professor Jose Marichal.

Hoang said the super delegate situation is a surprise to most people, "and what this exposes is that the whole process isn't very democratic."

But professor Fred Gordon disagreed, and said the super delegate idea serves "as a check-and-balance process, designed to moderate the procedure at the convention."

Gooch said the prospect of a Democratic convention without a frontrunner may not be such a bad thing. "The last brokered convention was in 1928," said Gooch. "And remember, Lincoln was not the first choice of the party in 1860 — he was way down the list."

After the forum, professors said the 2008 presidential race is making their classes compelling, even to nonpolitical students who are forced to take introductory classes as part of their general education at CLU.

"We had a standing-room-only crowd for a political science seminar today, and that's pretty good," said a smiling Hoang.

--- Published in the Ventura County Star on Feb. 13, 2008