Oh, What A Screwy System

Lounging around on Cloud 1787, a few of the Founding Fathers are conducting a seminar on the handiwork of 201 years ago. "The thing I cannot understand," says Franklin, "is why they keep quarreling over this nomination business." Madison, ever the detail man, replies, "We told them how to elect the President, but we didn't suggest how to decide who the competing candidates would be." Adams, the Boston lawyer, raises points of order. "The Constitution didn't even use the terms candidate or parties or political convention. Now they talk about 'nominating windows,' 'front-loading' and 'super-delegates,' a language that seems designed to make the system as baffling to ordinary voters as the Vulgate was to illiterate peasants." Asks Patrick Henry: "Who dreamed up this scheme? Is it good for democracy?"

In fact, no one dreamed up the Rube Goldberg system that now determines the nominees in each party; it evolved on its own, guided only by the law of unintended consequences. And no, the complex and arcane system is not good for democracy; successive attempts at reform have created the illusion of popular selection, not the reality. Most of the electorate is excluded from participating until a handful of voters in unrepresentative states winnows the field by at least half. If a Third World nation had devised such a nominating system and imposed it on its people, Americans might logically conclude that it had decided to forsake democracy.

Though the power of back-room bosses has been broken, other factions and interest groups manipulate the rules for their own benefit. What should be a deliberative search for candidates of heft becomes a demeaning marathon. What should help unify the party becomes a divisive struggle. Talented leaders remain on the sidelines rather than confront the Kafkaesque process. Long before voters focus on the people and issues involved, the dynamics of the nominating cycle are established on the basis of "expectations" and "momentum," with the press in charge of calibrating the standards. It is, in the words of Congressman Morris Udall, "one of the most unfortunate / systems imaginable for electing the leader of the most powerful nation on earth."

Nonetheless, the intentions of those who created this monster were honorable. Since the beginning of this century, progressives have fought for primaries as the most representative way of choosing the delegates who would select the party's ticket. What evolved was a mixed system. Candidates who needed to prove their electoral clout or show strength in a certain region could enter a few well-chosen primaries; those with established reputations generally would ignore them. The real decisions were made by back-room coalitions assembled at the convention. John Kennedy, for example, entered the West Virginia primary to prove he could win in an ardently Protestant state, then made his peace with the big-city bosses like Chicago's Richard Daley. Such an arrangement often froze out fresh faces and neglected dissenting minorities in the party. But it vetted candidates with a hard eye for their chances in the general election, and it imposed a rough kind of party unity behind the man lucky enough to make it to the White House.