White Superdudes

Me, from a discussion about superdelegates on Blue Oregon a month ago:

While the DNC superdelegates are relatively well-balanced from a cursory examination, the three hundred elected officials (former presidents and vice president, governors, senators, and representatives) are a pretty lopsided bunch, both on both ethnicity and sex. Not that you’d expect anything different from people elected to federal positions, but only 20% of them are women. Which means that even with the rest of the superdelegation being split evenly (which it is) more than 60% of the superdelegates are superdudes. And mostly white superdudes.

And a response from the usual quarters:

OK, so in addition to believing most of Western Europe and Japan to be non-democratic, darrelplant is now saying he hates Peter DeFazio and Earl Blumenauer for being white.

Because they must be all secretly members of the KKK or something; they’ve got this white dude mojo going on.

So obviously they’re going to vote for the white dude in this year’s nomination process.

Then there’s Jenny Greenleaf, the Oregon DNC committeewoman and a superdelegate, yesterday:

Superdelegates come from two places: elected officials and DNC members. The DNC is gender-balanced to a fare-thee-well, although not as diverse as it could be (still, it isn’t just a bunch of white, heterosexual men). Mostly, it’s old :-).

It is true that the majority of elected officials are white guys. However, when we select the pledged delegates to the convention, we take that into consideration.

And the same responder, with a much different take:

I had no direct role in electing Jenny, but I support her wholeheartedly. I also believe that as someone who has worked as hard as she has, trusted to keep the Democratic party whole, and dedicated to electing a Democrat in November, she has the right to cast her unpledged vote as she sees fit.