Getting the pros back into politics
As Democrats slip-slide their way through a plethora of men and women who would be president — the actual selection process starts tomorrow in Iowa – and as Donald Trump wiggles his way out of impeachment — and in the process trashes the Constitution — it might be worthwhile to consider how we got to this state of affairs.
Of course, there is more than a single reason. For the moment, however, let us ponder just one: the presidential nominating process.
Years ago, in a world far away, the great political commentator and thinker, Walter Lippmann, contemplating a field of active Democratic candidates that consisted of just two men, said there was “no reason to think” that year’s limited number of primaries would produce the best available person to sit in the White House.
Primaries were bogus, he said. They afford candidates “with the appetite for trivialities and half-truths and special pleadings and personal exhibitionism, which are almost the whole of the actual campaigning,” with special advantages.
Primary winners were the ones with the time, the energy, and the endurance to fight them.
Better for party members, and the nation, to hear the candidates speak from the floor of the Senate (both men were senators) “on a serious topic.”
Admittedly, Walter Lippmann was a Washington insider. His kind lost favor beginning in the 1960s, when a “new politics” swept all before it. “Fixer-uppers” and party chiefs, once crucial in the selection of presidential candidates, were soon tossed aside.
Henceforth, the nominating process would be placed in the hands of the people. Let the people decide! Well, the people decided and we ended up with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee in 2016 and eventually as president.
As for Democrats in 2020, we shall see. How does President Tom Steyer or Andrew Yang strike you? For that matter, how about President Bernie Sanders?
Not as bad as Donald Trump? That’s hardly possible. But ready to govern? Get real.
America is not going back to the days of Lippmann. Nor should it. There is a lot to be said on behalf of primaries and caucuses. Responding to the charge of former president Harry Truman that primaries were mere “eyewash” and amounted to nothing really, Sen. John F. Kennedy, fighting it out against Hubert Humphrey in the 1960 West Virginia primary, replied, “This is the place to be — in the hills and valleys and fields of West Virginia.”
Every senator or governor hopeful of the nomination should drop by. “After my many months here, I know something about West Virginia I didn’t know before.”
“The primaries are an imperfect guide but they are the only ones we have,” an editoralist for the Clarksburg, W.Va., Exponent wrote that April. Without primaries, the decision as to the identity of the nominee for president would go back “to the smoke-filled room.”
Kennedy himself said in that case his “name would never emerge.”
Hubert Humphrey would wait eight years for the nomination to come his way and when it did, it changed everything. Without having entered one primary, Humphrey captured the Democratic nomination for president in 1968. He was handed the prize by party bosses.
Democratic party reforms in 1972 were soon followed by Republican reforms. The age of nomination by party primaries and caucuses had arrived.
Enough already. Any system that produces Donald Trump on one side and the likes of Tulsi Gubbard on the other is dangerously out of whack. The current primary system, which mints candidates like Hershey mints candy bars, encourages factional organizing rather than coalition building. Such a system poses an imminent threat to the Republic.
The gatekeepers who stood guard against the unready as well as against political quacks, fools, and demagogues disappeared from the scene years ago. It’s time to reinstall what the Atlantic’s Jonathan Rauch calls American’s political middle men (and women) — the party bosses, high and low, who are chiefly concerned with electability and a stable and sane political environment.
Rauch argues that without a fully functioning and healthy political system, a fully functioning and healthy Constitutional system of checks and balance is impossible.
The Constitution needs partners invested in Constitutional norms and the rule of law. In a nation with a multiplicity of geographic, economic and societal interests, it needs a preponderance of officials who can run in two lanes at once, not one lane wonders, which is what we have today in part because of the underplay of political chieftains in the nominating process.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.