A couple days ago I noted the virtues of Fred Thompson as a candidate. Now Glenn Reynolds directs us to this piece that argues that Fred Thompson is the only sane candidate as he is the only one dismissive towards a process you'd have to be crazy to love. Reynolds' analysis is both penetrating and damning:
Thompson is running the kind of campaign -- substantive, policy-laden, not based on gimmicks or sound-bites -- that pundits and journalists say they want, but he's getting no credit for it from the people who claim that's what they want.
The people and the media clamor for a candidate who does not try to manipulate them, who doesn't run a campaign based on consultants and opinion polls. We say we want a candidate of substance who gives us honest answers to tough questions rather than just pandering to us like Santa Claus. And when we get that candidate we ignore him because he is too boring. It just goes to show the truth of what I often say: there is nothing the American people say they want more than a politician who acts with conviction rather than pandering to the opinion polls, and there is nothing we will punish more severely than a candidate or office holder who does just that.
Then there is the discussion of Iowa and caucuses, summed up nicely by Ken Blanchard. The question on the table is whether caucuses the proper way of selecting presidential nominees. Let me first point this out: caucuses are most definitely not "undemocratic." They are less democratic than primaries, but that does not make them un-democratic. Anyone can join a party and anyone can caucus. But the argument, apparently, is that it is too much to ask a free people to give up one night every four years to choose their party's nominee. And so there must something strange, even undemocratic, about a process that asks them to do so. But does it occur to people who gripe about the selection process that the problem is not too little democracy but too much? This is no doubt an unpopular opinion, but it is not proven false for being so. The supplanting of party meetings such as caucuses with primary elections has changed the way in which candidates seek the nomination. Rather than appealing to party leaders, i.e., office holders and those with formal party positions, the current system asks candidates to make their appeals directly to the people, and thanks to the front loading and condensing of the process, this is done more through media than through actual talking to voters (the virtue of Iowa and New Hampshire is that they are conspicuous exceptions to this rule as actual retail politics occurs in these two states). Thus the trend is toward empty image campaigns and pandering to the voter. On the contrary, party leaders are quite adept at picking candidates who will speak to the broad party coalition and who are competent to do the job. Contrary to conventional wisdom, a quieter and less public selection process may actually produce better candidates.
Some of the discussion above forms the basis of my rejection of regional primaries as suggested by USA Today and Prof. Blanchard. First, regional primaries are more likely to produce regional candidates, surely not good for the polity. While the first primary would rotate among the regions, some region must go first and a candidate from that region would have a decided advantage. Second, regional primaries would favor those with the most money to buy television advertising. Likely the regions developed for such a system would be so large as to make retail politics of limited use. Thus candidates would be encouraged to engage in mass appeals through mass advertising. If we wish to make the process better, the best thing we could do is to repeal all contribution limits on fund raising so all candidates can raise sufficient funds to run a campaign and make the process longer. That means working against front-loading. If we are worried about the undue influence of Iowa and New Hampshire, make the process longer so the immediate results of these two early contests can be overcome by the "losing" candidates through time and effort in the succeeding states. But the process is so truncated now that "momentum" is everything. A regional primary makes sense only if the regions are sufficiently small (say 4-8 states, depending on size of states) and the process takes place over an extended period of time, say January to June. This is six months of sober choosing rather than six weeks of pell mell, as we are soon to see.
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