Reply #6: Politico: "Ickes has new love for superdelegates" [View All]

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

Ickes has new love for superdelegates

By: Roger Simon
Feb 25, 2008 07:58 PM EST

...Ickes believes, as do most analysts, that neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama will get to the Democratic National Convention in Denver with enough pledged delegates won in primaries and caucuses to secure the nomination.

Which means that the superdelegates, who are party big shots, will have to choose the nominee.

“They are supposed to exercise leadership,” Ickes said of the superdelegates Monday at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters. “They are not sheep.”

But should they be kingmakers? (Or queenmakers?)

...It was not always thus. In 1988, the Rules and Bylaws Committee stripped DNC members of their superdelegate status. Though the status was later restored, do you know who led the charge to kick DNC members out of the superdelegate pool?

Harold Ickes.

“Yes, I stripped them, and I was working for Jesse Jackson at the time and we thought automatic delegates represented too much of an institutional interest and they didn’t recognize the qualities of someone like him,” Ickes told me in a phone interview a few days ago...