You know, after reading George Will’s latest Washington Post column, I’m beginning to wonder whether today’s mood is populist at all. He laments the decline of the political parties:
Doing something similar in presidential politics is difficult. The process has no gatekeepers: Remember the 2012 cycle, when Herman Cain had his 15 minutes as a front-runner? Misguided campaign finance regulations have diverted money away from experienced parties to unseasoned groups with minority agendas. The 2016 process illustrated the difficulty of aggregating voters’ preferences when there are many candidates: A demagogic charlatan won without winning a majority of primary votes until after the nomination was effectively settled. Sanders’s success so far this year demonstrates La Raja and Rauch’s warning that in a congested field of candidates, many will shun coalition-building in favor of wooing purists.
In 1924, the parties’ professionals blocked the presidential ambitions of industrialist Henry Ford, a racist and anti-Semite. In 1976, Democratic insiders helped clear the field in Florida’s presidential primary to enable Jimmy Carter to end the candidacy of the racist George Wallace. Today, however, the power of party professionals is negligible compared with that of the media. They prefer flamboyant political showhorses to transactional, coalition-building workhorses, and become accomplices of fringe candidates and combative amateurs.
La Raja and Rauch suggest various “filters†by political professionals to mitigate the “democracy fundamentalism†of today’s nomination process: e.g., more political professionals as “superdelegates†eligible to vote on conventions’ first ballots; pre-primary votes of confidence in candidates by members of Congress and governors; “abolishing or dramatically increasing†contribution limits to the parties. But a precondition for all improvement is, they acknowledge, “to change the mindset that regards popular elections as the only acceptable way to choose nominees.â€
Limiting and influencing voters’ choices by involving professional politicians early in the nomination process would require risk-averse political professionals to go against today’s populist sensibility. But if this November the choice is between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, the professionals might consider letting go of the wolf’s ears.
Is this really true?
Misguided campaign finance regulations have diverted money away from experienced parties to unseasoned groups with minority agendas.
or is what we are seeing the outcome of plutocracy? Only very well-heeled individuals or organizations have the dough to lay out enough money to finance the sorts of campaigns we’re seeing. I find it difficult to think of any campaign with three billionaires in it as “populist”. The reforms that would be required to curb that are exactly the sort that George Will has opposed for as long as I’ve been reading him.
Cry me a river, Will. None of your smooth slick prepackaged sound-bited cardboard cutouts (who would have crumpled up like wet paper napkins in the face of the lies and smears emitted by Clinton Inc and their MSM enablers). could hack it against an oafish boor who nonetheless won the hearts (or at least the votes) of people who felt they’d been badly served for decades by your preferred candidates and had had it. Because your side lost, you want the Republicans to duplicate the DNC machinery that stole the nomination from Bernie and stage-managed who knows how many previous election campaigns including the ones you cited.