Larison’s obituary for Rubiotron 4000:
Tonight’s results put the lie to the idea that he is one of the most viable competitors for the nomination. His bad result shows that he isn’t effective at winning over Republican voters in a larger presidential primary electorate, and it undermines his claim to be the best candidate for the general election. If the final results put him behind both Kasich and Bush, the question is not whether he can recover, but how long it will be before he drops out of the race all together. Instead of consolidating the “establishment” vote, Rubio will be left trying to spin his poor showing in Lieberman-like fashion. Rubio’s candidacy has never made much sense, and tonight’s results have shown that most Republicans don’t want him or what he’s selling.
Remember when Rudy Giuliani thought in 2008 he could skip Iowa and jet to Florida and sweep Super Tuesday? He also supported war at all times with all people, exploiting what he assumed was a GOP base rage at the perfidy of George Bush’s yielding to mollycoddles in his administration. This purported rage wasn’t enough. Rubiotron was in a particularly precarious situation because the base mistrusted him long before his linguistic and programming trouble. And attending Catholic and Protestant religious services had nothing on the skill with which Ted Cruz smears petroleum jelly on his face.
Meanwhile the interwebs were aflutter today with the news that Hillary Clinton can point to several hundred so-called superdelegates in her corner. In a thorough look at the history, Shane Ryan explains why no one should give a shit at this moment. The definitive work is Walter Karp’s Liberty Under Siege, in which the late reporter examines how the white union panjandrums who comprised the Democratic Party leadership schemed to keep the McGoverns and the Jimmy Carters from gumming up the works again; while it’s true Carter’s woeful political acumen hurt him, learning that the congressional establishment treated him like dog shit on a shoe doomed the success of a president who, thanks to Watergate and Gerald Ford’s bumbling, enjoyed the largest liberal support no one in his party would enjoy until Barack Obama in late 2009 (and only after Al Franken took his seat).
Created in the early eighties to keep upstarts like McGovern and Carter from becoming nominees, superdelegates worked their spell on Walter Mondale, the establishment choice early in 1984 (I’ve a youthful memory of this Newsweek cover) over later establishment favorite Gary Hart. They exist to keep voters from being sane.
But remember 2008. Superdelegate advantage means shit when they start defecting.
Humanizing The Vacuum 
