What a Flight!

On my flight home from the California State Democratic Convention (I was there on behalf of the Writers Guild - more on this later) ("More on this later" has become, for me, a kind of small-talk/politeness social lie. Although I suspect I am more the intended audience than you are.), I sat next to a man who was carrying the bright blue C-SPAN tote bag distributed to all convention attendees. Instead of watching an episode of Weeds on my iPod and potentially undermining our bargaining gains, I struck up a conversation with him. It turns out he is John Frierson, one of the Los Angeles Board of Transportation Commissioners, and for the rest of the flight (San Jose to LA - I wouldn't have done it if it weren't such a short flight) I peppered him with questions about transportation in the City of Angels, and he happily obliged with the answers. Some highlights:
- It is true that one of the main reasons we can't expand the LA subway's Red Line west to the ocean is that Beverly Hills won't allow it. But also, much of West LA sits atop the one-two punch of heightened seismic activity and pockets of natural gas - so another reason we can't expand the line, or that it would be more difficult than normal, is explosions. That's right. Explosions.
- Another way that Beverly Hills is an asshole is that it refuses to synchronize its traffic lights with the surrounding ones in LA.
- LA Metro Rapid Buses (the red "express" ones, not the orange local ones) are starting to have a gadget that allows them to extend the life of a green light (a so-called "stale green") and to change red lights to green. Of course during gridlock there is nothing to be done, but cool, huh?

Mr. Frierson is also one of California's State Athletic Commissioner, concentrating on Mixed Martial Arts. He's also 78 years old. He's also a Democratic Party Superdelegate. He's promised his support to... someone, but wants that person to drop out now so that he can switch without suffering political consequences. He also told me something very fascinating about the rationale behind superdelegates, which deserves its own paragraph.

I've always thought that Clinton's position on Florida and Michigan is disingenuous because of her pledge to abide by the DNC's sanction of those contests. She knew the rules going in. But I also have thought that the Obama campaign had been engaging in a slightly similar rule-reinterpretation when it claims that superdelegates should not go against the majority of pledged delegates. Superdelegates were first introduced in the 1984 election, and I thought that their very purpose was to protect the establishment against a challenger, to do the very thing that Clinton is asking of them. And I think I read somewhere that this idea was introduced to stop the Gary Hart campaign. Now, in the light of day, that particular reason seems a little far fetched because it ascribes to the DNC a little more organizational and machiavellian agility than is believable. But I did think that the point of superdelegates was elitism and that this was the system agreed to in advance, and though I agree with the Obama campaign's extrapolitical reasoning behind its claim, and I think what Clinton is doing is far more disingenuous, I was sensitive to the charge that he's "trying to change the rules." But this was not the original intention of having superdelegates, according to Mr. Frierson, who has been in the DNC since 1976. The idea was actually hatched in 1980, and merely implemented in 1984, and its purpose was to bring mayors and governors closer to the national party. According to him, the purpose of having superdelegates was always more abstract and ceremonial than procedural.