Where Are The Adults In The Room?
We got rid of them fifty years ago. Maybe that was a mistake.
Where are the party elders? Where is the wheelhorse, the stalwart, the old pro who could go to President Biden and say, “We love you, but the jig is up”? Where is the institutional Democratic party when we need it? Nowhere, of course: those are the “bosses” the party got rid of in a spasm of reform half a century ago. Just now it feels like it would be good to have them back.
The last presidential candidate to be nominated by the bosses was Hubert Humphrey. By the time Humphrey declared for president, in late April 1968, he had almost run out of time to enter the primaries, and in any case he knew that he could call in his chits among his fellow elders after twenty years as a senior party figure. Gene McCarthy swept the popular vote in Pennsylvania’s nonbinding primary, but state party leaders distributed virtually all the seats at their disposal to Humphrey and the unbound delegates ultimately went with him too. Those leaders, like cardinals in the Catholic church, stood atop a vast hierarchy that connected local clubs to county and state parties up to the the national committee. They were accountable all the way down–but to party members, not the public.
More Democracy, or More Bosses?
Widespread disgust with that blatant defiance of the will of voters put an end to boss rule. A commission headed by George McGovern and Donald Fraser, a Humphrey protégé, resonantly declared that “the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” The McGovern-Fraser Commission recommended drastic reforms–which the party accepted– that would remove the power of state parties over delegates, end the “unit” rule awarding all delegates to the primary winner and increase the representation of women and minorities. For many reasons, including the diminishing treasure of goodies to distribute, the old hierarchy collapsed.
The open system made it possible for neophytes like Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama to win the nomination in competition with far more established figures. It also opened the door to Donald Trump. In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe how the smoke-filled rooms of yore prevented fascists like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford from even competing for the Republican nomination. Those structures, they write, “served a gatekeeping function, keeping demonstrably unfit figures off the ballot and out of office.” Trump won the nomination in no small part because the party leaders who feared and loathed him could not clear the decks of the many candidates competing for the non-Trump vote. Primaries, which after McGovern-Fraser became the sole means of choosing a nominee, allow a candidate with an intense hold over a small fraction of partisans to win the race.
More Institutions, Less Charisma
Donald Trump has brought home the danger of a process without many guardrails catering to a public without much knowledge. In “Voters Need Help,” a 2020 Brookings report on party reform, Raymond L. LaRaja and Jonathan Rauch wrote that “Left to their own devices and the tender mercies of candidate ads and outside groups, voters do the best they can, but their abilities are limited. …the nomination proces makes unrealistic demands on voters, not because voters are lazy or stupid–they’re not–but because they are human.” LaRaja and Rauch would remove the smoke but restore some of the rooms where the old pros winnowed out the contenders. “Today’s most pressing–and most overlooked–task for political reform,” they write, “is not to perfect the populist filter but to restore and renew the professional filter.”
I am generally of the “more democracy” camp. My preferred solution to the problem of addled voters is to make them less stupid; that’s why I’m writing a book about civic education. I also favor changing the structure of candidates’ incentives through innovations like ranked-choice voting or non-partisan primaries. And I’m not convinced that renewing the professional filter–that is, fortifying party structures–would have kept Donald Trump from vaulting over the competition, at least without blatantly violating the voters’ will. Yet I accept you can’t depend on long-term solutions to a forest fire; we need guardrails. Rauch and LaRaja would authorize party leaders to interview candidates and issue or withhold a vote of confidence; enhance the role of “super-delegates,” who are appointed by state parties and not beholden to candidates; and, more broadly, revalorize the whole idea of a “political class.” They would, in short, have us un-do McGovern-Fraser, though I don’t think their proposed reforms would foreclose the chances of a future Obama.
Of course none of this would solve the Joe Biden problem. Incumbent presidents stand at the top of the party structure; what’s more, unlike Richard Nixon in 1974, Biden is the eldest of the elders. Only his own aides, and his family members, can force the president to see reason. Fervently do we pray that they’ll do so. That said, a Biden withdrawal would constitute an unprecedented test of the party mechanism. James Carville recently proposed that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama not only choose the candidates who would then compete for the nomination but moderate subsequent town halls. The idea sounds absurd, but, given the absence of institutional authority, who or what else is there? In the early 1950s the American Political Science Association suggested that each party establish a “council” of sixty or so senior elected officials and professionals to “consider and settle the larger problems of party management.” The Democrats might wish they had one of those just now.
As you get older you begin to have ever more respect for the institutions that have been aging along with you. Institutions, at least the ones worth caring about, restrain the whims and ambitions of the individuals who constitute them, preserve the values upon which they were founded, persist in the face of the insatiable demand for the new. This is surely true, for all their drawbacks, of political parties. I recognize that these are back-looking, Burkean virtues. It is not only age, however, but a decade of Donald Trump, that has turned me into an institutionalist.
I was out of college for 9 months during the 1968 campaign and shaved off my mustache to work (free) for Gene McCarthy in 1968. In Chicago, I was buttonholing delegates to vote for McCarthy over Humphrey. At the last minute, McGovern put his hat in the ring to split the antiwar vote and assure Humphrey's nomination.
In 1972, McGovern knew the new delegate/primary system better than anyone else, and Nixon sabotaged the primary campaigns of any credible candidates... so McGovern was able to lose 49 states ... to Nixon... in the general election. He won in Massachusetts and DC. But yeah, outsider Jimmy Carter won in 1976.
You may remember that New Engineer, which I edited, was evidently the first national publication to publish a story on Carter's campaign.. in October 1975. The writer, Stan Fisher, is still alive and living in Atlanta.