My first presidential vote was for McGovern in 1972. I was only a few days too young to vote in the 1968 election, when the voting age was 21 (my b-day is 11/8/47). By '72 the voting age had been lowered from 21 to 18 so I was suddently well over the minimum age.

I definitely believed that the older, more traditional, more conservative members of the Democratic party were wrong in comparison to us young enlightened peaceniks, but I did not, and still do not, characterize such disagreement as "corruption." I think that some of us need to consider this point of view. Sure, it's OK to privately believe that we're right and all those many other people who disagree with us are being duped by Big Biz and Big Media ~ but that's our opinion, and politics is about working out compromises and commmon objectives among citizens with differing opinions.

I believed back in 1972 (and had been believing for several years) that my deeply-held convictions were not shared by a majority of the population, and I was in fact pleasantly surprised when the "peace" candidate won a major-party nomination.

Of course, the results of that general election pretty much demonstrated that most Americans were NOT persuaded by the McGovern platform. (I'm sure that Nixon's dirty-trickery had a lot to do with the huge proportion of that's year's Democratic defeat, but that could not have been the whole story.)

While there might be a sense in which it is accurate to characterize the institution of the "superdelegates" as a 1984 "reform" measure, a more nuanced view consists in realizing that, for well more than a century prior to the 1970s, ALL delegates to EVERY nominating convention of BOTH parties (and to the Electoral College, too, for that matter) were "insiders" who pretty much met the definition of today's "supers."

There was a very brief recent period during which the Democratic Party suddenly and thoroughly turned over its reins to whoever came out of a set of state elections and/or caucuses, and then, quickly thereafter, there was a movement (and a common agreement) that it would be better to backtrack just a bit and reserve some seats and votes for the kind of established loyalists who formerly had held all the seats and votes.