An Organized Political Party

David von Drehle expresses concern about the potential for an upcoming shambles that will make the Iowa caucus look well-run in his Washington Post column:

Handwriting, meet wall. With so many candidates and this set of rules, can anyone win a majority? We have eight highly ambitious, well-funded people hunched feverishly at the craps table, some rolling hot dice, others sure their luck’s about to change. No one’s ready to walk away.

The field may eventually thin, but not before a lot more votes are cast. And the closer we get to the finish line without a clear winner, the less incentive exists for candidates to drop out. They’ll cling to their pledged delegates as potential bargaining chips.

If the new rules fail to produce a majority, an unholy spectacle of threats, cajolery and attempted deals will surely fill the weeks before the convention. Sanders is already laying the predicate, saying that a failure to anoint him as the nominee if he arrives with a plurality “would be a very divisive moment for the Democratic Party.”

No doubt he’s right, but arguably he’s the one doing the dividing. He spent his whole life outside the Democratic Party, but now he wants to own it. Besides: I’m not sure anyone in the party has enough sway to force a deal.

Suppose no one wins a first-ballot majority in Milwaukee. Chaos. The rules say that every delegate becomes a free agent, free to choose virtually any U.S. citizen over 35. What’s more, some 770 superdelegates (yes, them again) are added to the mix. Do they draft Oprah? Michelle Obama? Does anyone have Al Gore’s phone number? Did Hillary just enter the arena? Is that Bloomberg in a helicopter overhead, dropping cash to the delegates below?

Perhaps this could be avoided. Warren could throw her muscle behind Sanders and try to boost him past 50 percent. She doesn’t seem so inclined. The moderates could draw straws — again, not likely.

Maybe Sanders has a plan. Maybe his reshaping of the rules was intentional and strategic, and not the poorly thought-out tantrum it now appears to have been. But unless he can quickly accelerate from the roughly 25 percent share of voters he won in Iowa and New Hampshire to win decisive majorities from coast to coast, he has set the party on a course to unmapped territory.

The irony is that Sanders is the least-suited candidate for the melee of horse-trading and vote-swapping that may lie ahead. He has few friends in politics, having flaunted his purity through the muddy streets of government for decades, disdaining all who compromise. He makes no deals, so he has no chits to call in. He has offended key unions in the party’s labor base by insisting on an end to private health insurance. Grumpy, sanctimonious and unreflective, Sanders would be ill-equipped to strike the bargains necessary to win the nomination on a second or third — or fourth — ballot. A very divisive moment, indeed.

As a thought experiment let’s consider an entirely different model for presidential candidates. What if the objective were to pick the candidate best prepared to craft a new coalition to suit the changing times every four years? Whatever your views of Barack Obama as a president, you’ve got to admit that he left the Democratic Party in a weakened position after eight years in office. He just wasn’t interested in the job of creating a new, stronger Democratic Party.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t that person, either. And neither is Bernie Sanders.

4 comments… add one
  • bob sykes Link

    We had better candidates and better parties before the primary system took over. The old pols, like James Daley, made good decisions in the smoke-filled, back rooms.

  • steve Link

    Pierce, Buchanan, Tyler. Yup, they knew how to pick them in the old days.

    The Dems system has some issues, and they didnt prioritize developing new candidates, but at least, so far, they arent offering a Trump. Bernie comes closest but he at least sounds like he understands some of the issues.

    Steve

  • TarsTarkas Link

    ‘Bernie comes closest but he at least sounds like he understands some of the issues.’

    And his solutions are almost invariably the wrong ones, mainly that more regulation and government control is needed. Forgetting that the regulators and government bureaucrats are also people with their own interests and biases.

    I’m all for a radical revamping of the medical industry (which seems to be your area of interest and expertise), especially cleaning out the corrosive invasive crony-capitalistic roots that have almost completely clogged and broken its ducts and piping. But a one-size-fits-all Henry Ford kind of choice we’d get in health-care-for all ain’t it. Especially when (when, not if) ideologues get in charge or even worse greedy corrupt ideologues. Government intervention in almost anything is like surgery; there’s nothing you can’t make worse with it, and it still costs a bundle when when done wrong.

  • steve Link

    Medicare has been around for about 50 years. It is very popular among those who use it. It is significantly less expensive that privately insured health care. Why hasn’t Medicare been ruined by having it government run?

    Steve

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