As the Republican candidates continue to write the campaign ads against their eventual nominee, political junkies can wonder aloud about the role of the primaries in choosing party nominees.
Tomorrow New Hampshire will vote; on Jan. 21 it will be South Carolina’s turn. Then on to Florida before the race expands and takes in still more states — which is to say, still more ripping away at the characters, careers and capabilities of whomever remains standing.
By the time Romney, or Gingrich, or Paul, or Santorum is declared nominated — and that is almost certain to occur by the end of March, the American people will know all of the reasons why the winner should not be elected president. And that catalog of negatives will have been pounded into them by a jillion television ads and four-color flyers paid for by their fellow Republican opponents.
All the Democrats need say is, “this is what these Republicans think of this Republican who is running for president. They must know him best, who are we to doubt their judgment?”
This is the scene that our political primaries are setting for the general election to come.
There must be a better way. Or must there?
The primaries took the nomination process away from the political conventions 30 years ago, or so. Reform-minded activists rightly attacked the conventions as corrupt. Special interests dominated the political conventions, particularly at the state level. Primaries, reformers insisted, would give the people the power and take it out of the smoke-filled rooms full of fat-cat power brokers.
Maybe that happened. But the primaries, as it is plain to see, have brought new corruptions to the nomination process. Most damaging is the need candidates feel to destroy their fellow party members who are vying against them for the brass ring. A corollary evil is that the primary campaigns consume hundreds of millions of dollars — dollars that come from donors who will expect to be remembered in the bye and bye.
Of these two, the damage done by the need to put so much emphasis on the negative is most corrosive.
To test the effect, sit down and list the steps that each of the Republican contenders would take to create more jobs, to improve public education, to reduce poverty, to expand and improve health care and make it more affordable, to revitalize American manufacturing, to reduce U.S. dependence on energy imports and then add to that program of action any other initiatives the two or three Republicans who might become the nominee are saying now they will follow.
Draw a blank? No surprise.
It would be relatively easy to catalog each candidate’s weaknesses. Their opponents have done that over and over again about each other, drowning out any effort any one of them might have made to say what he or she would do if elected.
The debates make the interested public familiar with faces and voices but, by their minute-at-a-time structure, don’t give a candidate time to talk about an agenda or a philosophy. Those limitations make it easy to made destructive remarks about opponents; impossible to lay out a plan for the nation’s future.
WHAT IS THE alternative? The nation isn’t going to give nominating power back to the old political conventions. But perhaps the lessons taught by this primary season will provoke amendments to the system. How about two national elections: one to elect delegates to nominating conventions and another to choose the president from those nominees? That would do away with the smoke-filled rooms, lessen the power of the special interests and, if designed to do so, reduce the power of money in the process.
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