Hey, c’mon. Surely you’ve heard of the Military-Industrial Complex? This is the Election-Media Complex! Where do you think all those millions of campaign dollars go? JOBS! Jobs for staffers, for canvassers, for media production companies, for pollsters, for printers, for advertisers. Sure, the only final product is a winning candidate - but for a while at least it’s a very vibrant economy!
If we could only finally reach the point of permanent campaigning!
Oh, I just wanted to add - !!
A year-round election based economy is a good idea. I fully support it. Let’s ammend the constitution so that 1/24th of the house representatives are re-elected every month on a rotating schedule, and that all 100 senators are re-elected once per year. President and Vice Presidential elections will be held separately, 2 years apart from one another.
Let’s take them one at a time.
Spiro Agnew - I’ll see your Agnew and raise you a Palin. That said, I acknowledge here that we’re comparing 2 imperfect system, demonstrably imperfect in Agnew’s case.
Sargent Shriver - I had to look him up. I don’t see what’s wrong with him.
I’ll see your Goldwater and raise you a Reagan. Reagan won only because the moderate end of the primary ballot was split umpteen ways.
Thomas Dewey - Not sure what’s wrong with him either.
Harding - The state of the economy made a victory by his party inevitable. He was a compromise candidate – I see from wikipedia that the 1920 Republican convention coined the term, “Smoke filled room.” He certainly was qualified: wikipedia states, “A Republican from Ohio, Harding was an influential self-made newspaper publisher. He served in the Ohio Senate (1899–1903), as the 28th Lieutenant Governor of Ohio (1903–05) and as a U.S. Senator (1915–21).” He had a scandalous presidency, but there’s nothing in the primary system that makes it more prone to elect uncorruptable characters.
Herbert Hoover - Macroeconomics was only invented in 1936. Hoover applied conventional wisdom to the challenges of the Great Depression, which is all that we could expect. That we got an experimentalist President (FDR) was partly just dumb luck.
18th-Century Mercantilists and Physiocrats were macroeconomists.
Preach. It’s like people who start obsessing about baseball stats and predicting the World Series in April.
Yawn. Nothing you’re freaking out about right now will matter by June. Call me in August, when shit gets serious.
Election coverage has gotten noticeably more… umm… noticeable in the last decade or so. I hold the 24-hour news cycle to be worthy of most of the blame. In order to fill all that dead air, they have to cover something, and any sort of controversy they can muster not only fills the time but gets better ratings than uncontroversial news. And in an increastingly polarized electorate, also at least partially thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, what generates more controversy than politics?
Coverage of the Republican primaries is just gold. Left-leaning people are maybe interested in seeing if they have anything to offer, but probably more likely looking for their enemies to screw up or new things to hate them about more or to cheer or boo for the rise or fall of some candidate. Right-leaning people will keep a close eye on whichever ones fit their vision and, like watching a close game, get emotionally invested in even the smallest pole changes, especially when it affects the lead. And then you have random pundits on both sides endlessly analyzing every shift in the polls and then analyzing how the pundits on the otherside misanalyzed.
Seriously, political coverage just writes itself and it sells. It sucks, and I’d rather see more interesting news, but by virtue of us consuming all of it, we’ve brought it on ourselves. And, of course, the system doesn’t help either because if there’s any room to gain more exposure, if one candidate doesn’t take it, the other one will. And that just means more room for more coverage… and the cycle repeats, ad nauseam.
Perhaps, but their tools were mostly (bad) microeconomic ones. Before 1936 there wasn’t really a worked out theory of recession, recovery or even aggregate prices. Sure there were stories about manias during expansion leading naturally to a purging during recession. They persist to this day among commentators without economic training. But those weren’t especially rigorous, numeric or even necessarily coherent.
Or to put it bluntly, it wasn’t clear during the great contraction of 1929-33 that mass unemployment had a fundamentally simple cause -a lack of adequate aggregate demand- and a straightforward solution -fiscal expansion combined with monetary easing. What we’ve learned over the past 3-4 years is that this knowledge won’t make another depression impossible. Economic sabotage is a viable strategy for opposition parties. Inducing monetary authorities to explicitly advocate easy money stance is hard, even if its necessary to shift inflationary expectations. And the semi-federalist structures in the EU make coordinating expansionary policy very hard: specifically the Germans aren’t keen on bailing out everybody, nor do they want to inflate their way out of the continent’s troubles. And single country depreciation of the currency is not longer possible, at least without a probable and severe bank bank run when a country exits the Euro.
No, the refutation to Agnew is that Agnew wasn’t a product of the proverbial smoke-filled rooms. He was one of the first choices made by the new system, whereby the newly nominated presidential candidate chooses his running mate. The Republican party leadership didn’t foist Agnew on Nixon - it was Nixon who foisted Agnew on the Republican party leadership. (Granted, Agnew did have supporters besides Nixon but it was Nixon who pushed him forward.)
The argument now becomes would you want seasoned politicians of special interests picking your nominees?
My first ever SDMB thread back in March of 2000 was lamenting how both parties’ nominees had already essentially been chosen before most states had had the opportunity to hold primaries.
It’s just gotten more ridiculous since then.
It is sad that campaigns are judged successful or not ,depending on how much money they raise. Our campaigns are business ventures first.
Our politicians spend few hours governing. They spend much of it listening to lobbyists and raising money. How can that keep our government clean? It is bought and sold on the market and results are shown in papers and news programs.
I’m seeing an argument that the GOP has largely abandoned facts, logic, and reality in general, rather than an argument that the smoke-filled room was superior to the sort of nomination process we have now.
We had a similar nominating process on the Democratic side four years ago. The debate between Obama, Clinton, Edwards, and the others was quite interesting and satisfying from a policy point of view. We have one party with a lot of bright people who understand issues in great depth, and another party that’s run by screaming flying monkeys.
FWIW, if Obama should lose next year, it would hardly matter which of these lunatics is the beneficiary. Romney, the perfectly lubricated weathervane (kudos to Jon Huntsman), may be technically smarter and saner than Perry, Cain, or the rest of this crowd, but the GOP Congress will pass crazy legislation, and whoever’s elected will sign it, whether it’s Romney, Perry, or Man-On-Dog Santorum.
By 1968, it was SOP for a Presidential nominee to choose his running mate; it wasn’t any sort of new innovation.
But you’re right that Agnew wasn’t a product of smoke-filled rooms.
Agreed +10. The President can’t pass legislation on his own and Romney will be all to happy and eager to show that he’s one of them. In a crisis though, Romney might have better judgment than Perry.
Nice catch and nice point. But having party professionals run the show would automatically rule out distractions like Cain, Trump, Palin 2012 or Bachmann. Perry, Romney, Huntsman and possibly Gingrich would still be in the running. And the preferences of general election voters would receive a greater weight – though the case of Goldwater shows that the political judgment of professionals is hardly ironclad.
I dunno. I thought they all basically agreed with one another. There were a few twists, like Edwards putting health care on the agenda. I wonder whether party pros would be better at sensing time bombs like Edwards or Gary Hart.
I still shake my head at how far the GOP has fallen since 1978. They used to pride themselves in their competence. I agree that this development has little to do directly with the primary system. If I had to put my finger on one factor, I’d say that liberals gravitate to media that informs them, while modern conservatives seek reassurance. This explains the popularity of the Wall St Journal’s editorial page vs. Paul Krugman: anybody favoring the former over the latter would have lost a lot of money over the past few years.