Right. This is essentially saying that the voters for the party are too crazy to vote responsibly. But, you know, they are the voters for the party! You don’t make the crazy go away by still letting them vote but claiming they can’t do too much crazy harm with their crazy craziness.
And the bigger harm is arguably House and Senate candidates. Do they get vetted, too? And since the House has people like Bachmann in it, how in the world is the House an example of non-craziness?
Look, we used to have a system where party leaders chose the candidates – in the classic “smoke-filled room” – and that is exactly what the primary system was instituted to change.
And a lot of people are unhappy with the results. They think that the primary process skews the nominees to the crazy edges of the spectrum making the government more polarized and less able to govern well. I don’t have a better idea but I am not happy with only one sane choice for president because the nomination process has been co-opted by yelling lunatics instead of thinking adults. I would really like to have two sane choices for president with a discussion of plans for the country.
I like taking power from smoke filled rooms but I feel “We have met the enemy and he is us” with this round of primaries.
I don’t think it’s the primary process that’s doing that. The Republicans have been stirring up pots of hatred and craziness, then pulling an Urkel “Did I do that?” when it comes time to pick a non-crazy nominee. When you sow crazy as a strategy in your day-to-day governance, you reap the crazy whirlwind. I want parties to have to moderate their language all the time in order to have a sane electorate AND a sane candidate. By allowing the smoke-filled rooms to decide, we allow the daily MO to be birther commie insanity and then out walks a reasonable-looking person as the candidate. I want there to be repercussions for sowing the crazy.
What is the point of this? The political parties are private clubs that have somehow emerged as public institutions enabling a modicum of democracy. This sounds like a return to old machine politics.
How many democracies besides the US have a primary system? AFAIK, the answer is none. So characterizations of Tammany Hall and the like don’t bother me.
Objections
1.
a. So what? We’ve tested 2 systems. The old one works better. So let’s go with that one.
b. Wrong. The McGovern-Fraser Commission mandated open procedures for delegate selection: it did not mandate primaries. Primaries were an unintended consequence, decided in haste by the states. You could have smoke filled rooms with delegates chosen by a transparent process.
c. Though this is borderline off-topic anyway: my proposal is pretty mild.
Chronos’, partially handled earlier.
I had to think about this one:
Well it’s not really about curbing core crazy. It’s about curbing reality show contestants. However… my plan might be counter-productive to the extent it just papers over core crazy. Maybe. I guess the status quo usefully informs independents that one of the two major parties is absolutely bonkers. Although I would suspect that the Dems will face analogous problems within the next 12 years: Republicans innovate, Democrats play catch up. In any case, what’s the counter-plan?
The supposed success of the smoke-filled room comes from a time when money was not nearly the factor in the process that it has become today. A smoke-filled room of party leaders is one thing; one filled with the X richest Republicans regardless of political experience is another. And unless there is some legislation to curb the amount of money in political campaigns (not advocating one way or the other, just stating a fact), you can bet that wealthy interests are going to want significant influence over the process, whether they are primaries or smoke-filled rooms.
Now, I agree it would be nice if the reality-show contestants pretending to run a presidential campaign in order to sell their latest book were not part of the process. But I doubt changing the primary system would eliminate that. These creatures exist because of the tremendous amount of money that is flooding the process.
I have to agree with JM on this. Fringe candidates are often looney, but some candidates get into it not because they think they can win, but because they have issues no one else wants to talk about. By ‘no one else’, I mean the establishment candidates, not the general public. The example is not Cain or Trump, but Ron Paul and maybe Rick Santorum. They will bring up the issues they feel their party should be addressing. sadly, the only reason they can bring them up is that they have no real chance and therefore nothing to lose.
What would have curbed them would have been a Republican universe where a qualified candidate who wasn’t at least pretending to subscribe to batshit crazy nonsense could have stood a chance.
I don’t see where you’re going with this. In the 2000 cycle, GWB was rather overwhelmingly the party insiders’ choice. And Reagan was more or less their guy in 1980, the guy whose turn it was. And they were actually quite good candidates, whatever one may think of their presidencies.
The Dem side is a whole different kettle of fish, since the party insiders as often as not don’t have a dog in the fight, with 1976 and 1988 being good examples, along with 2004. Aside from years where an incumbent President was running for re-election, or an incumbent veep was running to succeed him, I can only see a couple of years where the party insiders got behind a particular candidate: Hillary in 2008 (who would have been a pretty good candidate most years), and Mondale in 1984 (who made Dukakis look charismatic by comparison). So the party insiders on the Dem side have a mixed record, to the extent that they have a record.
I just don’t see that there’s all that much to be gained by having an exclusion process for the Herman Cains of the world. If the party itself has anyone halfway appealing, they’ll stay in the white noise in terms of support. If one is looking for an excuse to get them off the debate stage, the answer is a few very early primaries, like the year before the election year. Have the Iowa caucuses in June 2015 next time, and New Hampshire that September. They might be little more than straw polls that early, but they’d be real enough that debate organizers could use them as an excuse to kick the low performers off the stage.
I really do not understand why people constantly want to decrease democracy. What does ceding our power to pick who we want to vote for in the primaries get us? The winning candidate is still going to be the same person*, yet people are going to be less engaged in the political process.
Like it or not, but the reality show aspect is what gets people to watch. I wouldn’t even know anything about politics right now if not for jokes from the Daily Show or Colbert Report.
*I don’t know why you think it would be a different person. You didn’t set up any way for the party officials to pick someone, just added a hurdle to getting on the ballot. The same people are going to apply, it’s just that some of them will be eliminated earlier.
So…your proposed system is one where people are only allowed to vote for candidates that have been preselected by an oligarchy of entrenched interests? Sounds remarkably like Soviet-era “elections” where the party picks the candidate that you WILL vote for. Because, yeah. I trust a bunch of incumbents to have the power to pick their own boss*.
*Yes, the President isn’t the “boss” of Congress. But they’re picking the stooge they want to have veto power over them.
If you have an issue that nobody else is talking about, get a webpage. Don’t sign up to be leader of the free world.
People don’t constantly talk about this, and my support of smoke filled rooms is a minority position.
Look, I’d be all for proportional representation in the Fall: I’d like the American people to have more meaningful choices. But to vote on who gets on the ballot in November is a getting to be a little meta. But hey, why don’t we vote on who gets to run in the Democratic or Republican primary? That would be even more democratic, right? Then during the primary we can vote for who gets to be on the ballot in November. And we’ll do all that using a winner-take-all system, which most (not all) experts agree is a terrible way to measure voter preferences.
No other country in the world does it this way, and the US adopted the current system mostly by accident.
An oligarchy of entrenched interests. Gathering eight signatures out of ~375 elected officials means you need the permission of an oligarchy of entrenched interests.
Actually my proposal is more like cannibalism, Pol Pot, or maybe nuclear war.
RTFirefly: Nice post. I’ll quibble about Mondale: he actually did pretty well given the state of the economy, while Dukakis was awful. I honestly lack the expertise to know whether Reagan would have been nominated in 1980 if the McGovern-Fraser Commission had never met. Anyway that’s for another thread. What I’m saying here is that a baby step towards the smoke filled room (and sheesh I’m talking about 8 measly signatures) shouldn’t bother us. I mean is it unreasonable to have somebody with skin in the game vet the next President? I concede that GWBush was vetted by Cheney, George Schultz et al and boy do they have some explaining to do.
Sooooo… being at risk of to “sanction” if you sign off on a non-approved candidate does not imply a need for “permission” from the Party Apparatus.
At least one of those words does not mean what you think it means.
You know, your average person has more to lose because of a bad president than your party bigwigs. They HAVE skin in the game. (Jesus christ, that phrase annoys me.)
Yes. Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with the term but “oligarchy” doesn’t mean “majority”. An “oligarchy” is when (to quote Wikipedia) “political power is primarily held by a wealthy elite, who comprise a small minority of the population, and who use this power primarily to serve their own class interests.”
Citizens should not have to get approval from a small group of people who are already entrenched in the political system to elect new candidates.
As to your belief that your proposal has commonality with Pol Pot, cannibalism & nuclear war, I personally don’t see it, but hey, given your screwball OP, I’m not inclined to delve to deeply into your ideas.
Trump didn’t run for President.
Trump announced he was going to run for President and then got press
Trump dropped the idea of running for President and then got press
Trump announced he was holding a debate and then got press
Trump dropped his debate idea and then got press
Trump announced he may run as an independent and then got press.
None of these would have been prevented under your system.
What people seem to be missing here is that, in fact, the Republicans DIDN’T vote for the really embarrassing ones. They didn’t vote for Bachman, or Cain. A handful voted for Santorum and Gingrich, and of course Paul, but really very few on a nationwide scale.
What you really want is a system whereby the media does not REPORT on anyone who was not vetted by the party insiders. But no, you really don’t want that, do you.
I must say we post in a fine message board: the arguments lobbed against my proposal have been varied and reasonable, my occasional snark notwithstanding.
I was imagining that those who plopped for unqualified candidates would be finger-wagged by opinion leaders and voters, to some small extent. It would be termed as an “Embarrassment”, and would hardly be electorally fatal.
Look, the Tea Party has its own caucus in Washington. It has 62 members. I don’t doubt that Michele Bachmann, the chair, could field 8 sigs from that group alone, though she has no legislative accomplishments to her name. But supporting her in that way might become a mild embarrassment. As I said, my proposal is pretty weak stuff.
Gotcha. We do live in an oligarchy: it’s a post Citizens United oligarchy of those who can drop $1 million on anonymous attack ads without breaking a sweat. But those guys really won’t be affected by my proposal in one way or another. They convert campaign cash into tax breaks and oil subsidies and then back into campaign cash. The boys in DC are just conduits.
I was suggesting that your comparisons with Soviet Russia were overwrought. Remember, most of the democratic world doesn’t choose its heads of state with a primary system.
Well, not really. Ballots are secret. Moreover, a single vote never makes a difference. So people can choose their leaders based on emotive affiliation and tribalism. In the economic marketplace bad decisions (of which there are many) have direct consequences. Not so in the voting booth. Cite.
::Tips Hat::
Well, that’s sort of what I do want. I want Donald Trump to be asked which party leaders has he lined up, in order to take some wind out of his sails. I want CNN to make this a requirement for candidates appearing on stage in a intra-party debate. In short I want Herman Cain to have the profile of less-monied competitors such as Buddy Roemer or even Gary Johnson. And I want to embarrass Rick Perry’s hypothetical vetters.
Let’s not forget, crappy Presidents have consequences. Those working under GWBush noticed that they could push their ideas further if they dropped phrases like “Game changer” during their presentations. And there were several cases (Katrina, the Iraq War) where you really wanted somebody up top with a skeptical attitude and penetrating questions. Now admittedly both Clintons, Romney and Obama have those chops. But McCain and Reagan did not and Carter simply lacked experience.
Also: your average person can’t have a meaningful and candid interview with the Presidential hopeful. Even if he lives in Iowa or New Hampshire. He can evaluate their policies, which is important and is part of the essence of democracy. But he can’t really participate in a vetting process.
Do people object to the idea of a vetting process? Because I assure you that it takes place: candidates spend a huge share of their time chasing down campaign contributions. Old hands recruit: they pulled poor Rick Perry out of a hat for example. My proposal just adds another layer to the process, a relatively transparent layer I would add.
That’s no different from the political endorsements we have now.