Oh, What A Screwy System

By Laurence I. Barrett

Lounging around on Cloud 1787, a few of the Founding Fathers are conducting a seminar on the handiwork of 201 years ago. "The thing I cannot understand," says Franklin, "is why they keep quarreling over this nomination business." Madison, ever the detail man, replies, "We told them how to elect the President, but we didn't suggest how to decide who the competing candidates would be." Adams, the Boston lawyer, raises points of order. "The Constitution didn't even use the terms candidate or parties or political convention. Now they talk about 'nominating windows,' 'front-loading' and 'super-delegates,' a language that seems designed to make the system as baffling to ordinary voters as the Vulgate was to illiterate peasants." Asks Patrick Henry: "Who dreamed up this scheme? Is it good for democracy?"

In fact, no one dreamed up the Rube Goldberg system that now determines the nominees in each party; it evolved on its own, guided only by the law of unintended consequences. And no, the complex and arcane system is not good for democracy; successive attempts at reform have created the illusion of popular selection, not the reality. Most of the electorate is excluded from participating until a handful of voters in unrepresentative states winnows the field by at least half. If a Third World nation had devised such a nominating system and imposed it on its people, Americans might logically conclude that it had decided to forsake democracy.

Though the power of back-room bosses has been broken, other factions and interest groups manipulate the rules for their own benefit. What should be a deliberative search for candidates of heft becomes a demeaning marathon. What should help unify the party becomes a divisive struggle. Talented leaders remain on the sidelines rather than confront the Kafkaesque process. Long before voters focus on the people and issues involved, the dynamics of the nominating cycle are established on the basis of "expectations" and "momentum," with the press in charge of calibrating the standards. It is, in the words of Congressman Morris Udall, "one of the most unfortunate / systems imaginable for electing the leader of the most powerful nation on earth."

Nonetheless, the intentions of those who created this monster were honorable. Since the beginning of this century, progressives have fought for primaries as the most representative way of choosing the delegates who would select the party's ticket. What evolved was a mixed system. Candidates who needed to prove their electoral clout or show strength in a certain region could enter a few well-chosen primaries; those with established reputations generally would ignore them. The real decisions were made by back-room coalitions assembled at the convention. John Kennedy, for example, entered the West Virginia primary to prove he could win in an ardently Protestant state, then made his peace with the big-city bosses like Chicago's Richard Daley. Such an arrangement often froze out fresh faces and neglected dissenting minorities in the party. But it vetted candidates with a hard eye for their chances in the general election, and it imposed a rough kind of party unity behind the man lucky enough to make it to the White House.

Party discipline, waning in the mid-'60s, had its last hurrah at the 1968 Democratic Convention, where the barons forced the nomination of Hubert Humphrey. That provoked a spasm of reform that had stunning (and debilitating) success. The first in a series of party commissions radically altered the rules in favor of "open democracy." Increasingly, delegates chosen by primary or caucus would be bound to actual candidates rather than to party leaders who might use them in brokerage. Though the movement was a Democratic invention, Republicans were also affected because many changes were imposed by Democratic legislatures.

Since no central authority had the power to establish a logical sequence of contests, a few enterprising state party officials were able to seize the initiative. Iowa Democrats moved fastest, pushing their 1972 caucuses ahead of the New Hampshire primary. George McGovern, chairman of the first reform commission, understood the new dynamics well. The obscure Senator from neighboring South Dakota had both cultural affinity and the antiwar movement going for him in Iowa.

The press, looking for new gauges of political credibility, gave McGovern a publicity boost when he finished third in Iowa (behind Edmund Muskie and "uncommitted"). Muskie won in New Hampshire as well, but McGovern, trailing by only 9 percentage points, again triumphed in the expectations game. He rode that wave to the nomination -- and then to a resounding defeat as traditional Democratic voters, appalled that ultra-liberals had taken over the party, defected to Richard Nixon.

For 1976, Iowa Republicans took the Democrats' cue, moving their caucuses to the lead-off position, and the press began to make Iowa the First Great Test. While New Hampshire had been significant for decades, it and Iowa together suddenly became critical. From 1976 onward, candidates would have to lavish time on these two unrepresentative states, massaging less than 2% of the population, while the other 98% of the electorate awaited the outcome. Without victory in at least one of these two rounds and a good showing in the other, a candidate would flunk the momentum test, lose his ability to attract contributors and watch his press coverage disappear.

Iowa and New Hampshire leaders argue that their states allow lesser-known candidates to conduct low-cost "retail" campaigns for months, testing their wares and encountering thousands of voters face to face. True, but the demands of that kind of campaigning work against prospects who hold difficult jobs -- New York Governor Mario Cuomo is the best current example -- and pressure candidates to lavish attention on small, well-organized interest groups. In the actual caucuses, less than 15% of enrolled Iowa voters usually participate, and the reported results are sometimes misleading. Drake University Professor Hugh Winebrenner, in a new book on the caucuses, The Iowa Precinct Caucuses: The Making of a Media Event (Iowa State University Press; $15.95), points out that even if his state were a microcosm of the country, the peculiar machinery fails to produce an accurate measure of Iowans' sentiments. "Essentially meaningless caucus outcomes," he argues, "are reported to satisfy the media's needs for 'hard data' about the progress of the race."

After Iowa and New Hampshire, the field narrows drastically, long before voters in larger states can cast a ballot. Most candidates must adopt an identical strategy: labor mightily for an early kill while preparing for an endurance run later. Schedule and rules, far more than issues and message, dominate.

And the process keeps changing. The Democratic leadership, aware for years that the post-1968 reforms were flawed, has continued to tinker. But despite a consensus that the calendar had to be made more rational, no one could control ) the "nomination window" in either party. States resentful of Iowa's and New Hampshire's clout have moved up their contests to create "front-loading," a jumble of primaries and caucuses in the first month of action. Front-loading enhances the importance of doing well in the first two major competitions. Voters in the second and third rounds, having seen little of the candidates, have only a few weeks to review the field, weeks in which news is dominated by wins and losses rather than by who stands for what.

Michigan Republicans decided to stage the earliest selection process of any this year, beating out even Iowa. They returned to a kooky, multitiered convention system starting 27 months before the general election. As the regulars slept, conservative supporters of Pat Robertson and Jack Kemp took over the party apparatus. When George Bush's partisans woke up, a series of bruising lawsuits followed. After last week's debacle, the result may be a contested delegation. Says Field Reichardt, a moderate who helped draft the Michigan plan: "We should never have done this. In the short run, it's causing our party to self-destruct."

The biggest front-loading rebellion for 1988 occurred in the South, where Tory Democrats have suffered terminal frustration over the liberal influence of Iowa and New Hampshire. They conspired to construct Super Tuesday, March 8, when 14 Southern and Border states will choose a fourth of the Democratic (and nearly a third of the Republican) delegates. The intent was to diminish the impact of Iowa and New Hampshire, forcing candidates to court moderate voters elsewhere. Yet most candidates in both parties have wooed Iowa and New Hampshire more intently than ever, fearing that bad showings would cripple them before they could get to the South. And because blacks are so large a part of the Dixie Democratic vote, Jesse Jackson, the most liberal of the candidates, is likely to laugh last when the Democratic votes are counted on Super Tuesday, hardly the result the region's establishment had in mind.

Even before the first 1988 primary vote, there is talk about the need for further change. Surprisingly, some Iowans also sense a new turn of the wheel. Says George Wittgraf, director of the Bush Iowa campaign: "This is too much weight to be on the shoulders of one state. I don't think Iowa will ever again be as important as it is in 1988." There are signs of candidates' trying new strategies: Albert Gore is holding back until the Super Tuesday races in the South; Cuomo is sitting on the sidelines and refusing to rule out a late entry should the whole nominating contraption freeze up.

Yet there is great fatalism about the prospects for sweeping reform. "After every election," says Republican Analyst John Sears, "we all stomp the ground and say how terrible it is. And by the time we do it again, we've made it worse." Sears should know; he was a member of the bipartisan Commission on National Elections, which two years ago produced a few modest proposals for dealing with the nominating system's worst features. Not one of those ideas has been put into effect.

While no one wants a return to boss rule, a large exertion of authority is necessary. That can come only from Congress, because no state or region will willingly cede influence. One scheme promoted by Michigan Congressman Sander Levin goes in the right direction. It would set six dates between March and June for a series of "interregional" primaries. On each date, a group of states of various sizes from different regions of the country would hold contests. The order would rotate.

Like every master plan, Levin's has drawbacks. It would make it more difficult for an unknown candidate to hustle his way to prominence in one small arena. But a sensible calendar imposed by Congress would compel candidates to take a national approach from the start and would reduce the clout of small, ideological factions. Does a plan like this have a chance of enactment? "It's on the back burner," Levin sighs, "and will remain there until the pots on the front burner explode." Given today's bubbling turmoil, 1988 may bring the system to that point of combustion.

CHART: TEXT NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME CHART by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: LANDMARKS & LANDMINES

DESCRIPTION: Primary elections and delegate selection for presidential nominating conventions.