A couple notions that I articulated yesterday in this post on our election system get touched on somewhere else today.
Yesterday I argued against regional primaries. One of my arguments was that the likely regions that would make up such a system would be so big that they would exacerbate the problems of the current system. Now South Dakota party officials are talking about a regional primary, and what do you know, the suggestion seems to be to break up the nation into four enormous regions.
Chris Nelson, secretary of state, said Wednesday that the political parties should switch to rotating regional primaries among four clusters of states.
Every four years, one of those clusters would hold primaries on the earliest date, perhaps in early February or March, and the other regions would follow suit at one-month intervals, said Nelson, a Republican.
"It would really force the candidates to get out and visit states across the country, as opposed to focusing on a couple of early states," he said.
I beg to differ with our fine secretary of state. This proposal would force candidates to run a lot of television ads in those regions, but no one can adequately cover the enormous territory covered by the regions in a way that voters can really get to know them. Also, only high money candidates could afford to run such a race since it requires being able to run in multiple states right off the bat. So a candidate cannot start slowly and build a following.
Yesterday I suggested that regional primaries would lead to more image campaigning through television. I also suggested that the problem with our presidential selection process was not too little democracy, but perhaps too much. Here is former television writer William Katz arguing that television distorts the candidates. He also suggests, as I did, that party leaders can serve a useful purpose by weeding out unserious and unqualified candidates. Katz is describing why in our modern age of technology and information we know less about our candidates than before. Some snippets:
But why do they seem so distant? I think there are three reasons. First, the TV myth. Television, we're told, brings us closer to events. No, it doesn't. It brings us closer to the coverage of events, and the staging of events. But the very staging of something for TV separates us from the candidate. That, of course, is the purpose – to create illusion, not reality. (snip)
The second reason for the distance between public and candidate is a routine demeaning of the American voter. Voters, we're told, are impatient, they won't listen, they're not interested, so let's reduce everything to sound bites. Strange, but Lincoln and Douglas debated for hours, and people listened, often in blazing Illinois heat. (snip) Yet, every time something happens in a campaign, the polls instantly change. People are interested, they do follow, they do react. The press should respond by presenting a more detailed picture of each candidate, not the CliffsNotes version we see today. (snip)
The third reason for the distance, and the most important, in my view, is that the concept of "knowing" the candidates has changed, in part because the selection process has changed. (snip) There were, if I may I use the term, professional politicians standing between the people and the candidates, and one role they played was to screen out the hopeless cases. Yes, I know, I know, the process wasn't all that democratic. And yes, there were so-called "bosses" involved, and they controlled blocks of delegates. Richard Daley in Chicago and Carmine De Sapio in New York were not Jeffersonian. But they were, despite their sins, men who had a kind of professional pride. They would not go to a national convention and nominate a jerk.
Read the whole thing to get an illustrative story about former Illinois Senator Paul Douglas that helps illuminate Katz's last point.
Recent Comments