Analysis: The Importance of Super Delegates at the 2008 Democratic National Convention

There will be 4,049 delegates attending the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, which means that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will need 2,025 delegates to win the nomination. Of the total, 796 are super delegates, delegates to the Democratic convention that have a right to vote for the prospective nominee on the basis of their public position. Super delegates include elected officials such as U.S. Representatives, Senators and state governors, and party leaders such as members of the Democratic National Committee and the chairs of the state parties.

Super delegates were created by the Democratic Party in 1980, and were intended to attend subsequent conventions. The genesis of the creation of super delegates was a desire to dampen down the democracy that was infused in the Democratic Party as a result of the bruising 1968 political convention in Chicago, Illinois. At that convention, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was handed the presidential nomination by Party regulars such as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, ignoring Senator Eugene McCarthy, who -- along with the slain Senator Robert F. Kennedy -- had battled it out during the primary season.

If Kennedy had lived, he likely would have been the Democratic nominee in 1968 tasked with taking on Richard Nixon, the Republican Party pick for president. As it was, the Kennedy forces at the convention refused to give their support to Eugene McCarthy, who had knocked President Lyndon Baines Johnson out of the race for the Democratic nomination by opposing the Vietnam War . McCarthy, who had won primaries such as Pennsylvania by huge margins, was given only a handful of delegates by the state party bosses at the '68 convention, most of whom went with Humphrey, the "Happy Warrior," a party stalwart.