We can be pretty sure the Democratic Party’s superdelegates don’t curl up in a chair every evening musing over Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” However, we can be absolutely certain those pompous reactionaries agonize day and night over a Democratic Party wildly “turning and turning in the widening gyre” of anger, foul play, and bitterness.

In fact, though the supers wear a smile in public, most of the card-carrying aristocrats must be pulling out their hair, so distraught are they that the Party’s ugly in-fighting will get so bad as to make “things fall apart,” indeed, fall apart so much that “the centre cannot hold,” unleashing that Democratic horror of horrors: the “mere anarchy” of 1968.

We can also say of a repugnant bunch who accept the label “supercitizen” that like all who can’t stand democracy when it stands in their way, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

Of course, those words from Yeats’ poem simply give us another way of saying the supers are politicians, a fact explaining why the threat of things falling apart after Oregon will stiffen their spines just enough to allow them to coalesce around Barack Obama.

(Because they are politicians, they will then mutter disingenuous regrets to Hillary and Bill, incapable of mustering the courage to do what is right for the nation and their party by telling the sleazy duo to slouch towards Chappaqua, taking their monarchial dream with them.)

But why all this unity after the Oregon Primary?

To answer that question we must return to the past, say, 1960, when, out of sight of televison’s eye, party bosses (the superdelegates of those days) hid their dirty deal making behind closed doors. 

Later, amid an atmosphere of tense anticipation whipped up by cheerleading floor reporters, state party chairs spoke not a word about back rooms and bosses as they proudly intoned, “The great state of . . ., canteloupe capital of the worrrrld, casts 80 votes for the next prrrresident of the United States . . .”

During their few seconds in the bright lights, those party stalwarts never demeaned smaller states or complained about what might, could, or should have been; for they understood that the game was now all about revealing which candidate would garner the majority of “democratically” elected delegates and which state would enjoy the privilege of putting that candidate over the top.

When we apply the lessons learned from smoke-filled rooms where party bosses told citizens what was good for them and convention floors where party lieutenants pretended everything was on the up and up to the current Democratic primary, we get the  answers to the “Why after Oregon” question. 

…Because in 2008 Oregon will announce that Barack Obama has won a majority of the Democratic Party’s elected delegates, the Jeffersonian answer to delegates bought in rooms in which a cigar is never just a cigar, its size and cost denoting the size of one’s power and the cost of one’s influence.

…Because the modern media will instantaneously flash news of Obama’s victory to the nation and the world.

…Because it is nearly impossible Michigan and Florida will reverse the reality established by Oregon. (To garner just one more elected delegate than Obama, Mrs. Clinton must swamp him in virtually every primary from Pennsylvania to Puerto Rico and score 60% wins in both Michigan and Florida.)

…Because upon hearing the news, Obama voters, including 90% of black voters and millions of white Liberals and Obamayouth, will focus on “superdelegate” as the abominable euphemism it is.

…Because as they ponder that euphemism and contemplate a rejection of their man by the supers, the Obama majority will threaten to create an ever “widening gyre” of turmoil sure to culminate in an ugly vortex of anger, epithets, and fists in Denver, a fact that has frightening implications not just for Democrats in November but for the Democratic Party’s future.

…because the more the public focuses on the supers, the more it will perceive them as a metaphor for the Democratic Party’s fundamental illness, an illness that impels a body to mindlessly huff and puff on that arrogant, wasteful, democracy destroying twist of decrepit tobacco popular today only among pompous ass Leftist “intellectuals,” jackass Leftist dictators, and fat ass members of the world’s celebrity culture.

It is true, of course, that despite all the “becauses” mentioned, the supers will decide to do something else after Oregon. Fortunately for America, their behavior doesn’t matter in the long run; for whether they choose Obama or offer the nation a second coming of the Clinton scourge, there will be an election season this fall in which voters will make up their minds about John McCain and the Democratic nominee after carefully considering a number of crucially important issues — especially the ones implicit in the final “because” listed above.

Copyright by A.J. DiCintio