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Are conventions coronations or exercises in democracy?

This Web only Speakout has not been edited.

Robert Hardaway

Published April 9, 2008 at 9:19 a.m.

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The Obama-Clinton contest has many Democrats fretting about the prospects of a “bloodbath” at the Democratic Convention in Denver this summer. This fear is apparently based on the premise that a vigorously contested exercise in democracy would “turn off” the TV-watching public who presumably would much prefer to watch a coronation ceremony punctuated by hours and hours of political posturing and demagogic speechmaking.

But consider what the TV ratings might be of a Super Bowl contest in which prior to the scheduled game day, one of the two teams agreed to “bow out” of the contest so that a coronation of the surviving team, rather than an actual game, would take place in the Super Dome.

A bit of history might also put the fear of a “bloodbath” into perspective. Prior to the “reforms” enacted after the 1968 Democratic convention debacle (in which Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination despite having failed to win a single primary) there was rarely an expectation of a nominee winner until the convention, and such conventions were never described as bloodbaths. As recently as 1980 the Democratic nomination wasn’t “locked up” until the convention, and in 1952 it took three ballots to nominate Adlai Stevenson. Lincoln too wasn’t nominated until the third ballot at the Republican convention and it took no less than 103 ballots to nominate John Davis at the 1924 Democratic Convention.

In recent years, however, the American public has become accustomed to having a nominee chosen prior to the convention, and party apparatchiks have become accustomed to conventions unmarred by dissent in order to present the convention as a coronation ceremony celebrating the “unity” of the party.

The recent expectation of convention as coronation, however, has been made possible only by the staggered primary system implemented since 1968. Under this system, an initial array of ten to twelve candidates is gradually winnowed down to one or two during the early Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary in which each candidate is put through a brutal obstacle course of town meetings and impromptu speeches on the campaign trail.

Naturally this system inevitably led to a frenzy in which states competed with each other to see who could hold the earliest primary, ultimately culminating this year in open rebellion in states like Florida and Michigan which defied national party officials by setting early primaries. This in turn led to “punishment” by national party officials in the form of disenfranchising millions of primary voters.

One proposed alternative to this kind of electoral disaster has been to hold an early national primary. However, such a primary would surely result in a split in primary votes along the lines of the early polls in which no one candidate receives more than 18 or 20 % of the votes. This in turn would return us to the days of a “brokered” convention—a euphemism for a convention in which a nominee is chosen in smoke-filled rooms.

Ironically, the Democratic system of choosing “super delegates”, originally designed to give party apparatchiks the power to override an improvident choice by primary voters of an ultra-left wing nominee (like McGovern) who would lead the party to disaster, is now being decried because it is now being proposed by Hilary that the super-delegates do precisely that, given that Obama has the most extreme left-wing voting record of any senator on record.

Ultimately the party elders will have to choose between a convention “bloodbath” and retention of the traditional staggered primary system. They obviously can not have both.

Robert Hardaway is Professor of Law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law and the author of “Crisis at the Polls: The Case for Reform of America’s Antiquated Electoral System” (forthcoming, Greenwood Press).

Comments

  • April 9, 2008

    12:33 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    dilligaf writes:

    SASQUATCH:
    Three posts in a row? I think your talking to your self over an hour and 16 minutes. I think people are getting tired of responding to you and Earl.

  • April 10, 2008

    11:17 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    jay writes:

    I was appalled at hearing rush limbaugh on tuesday "hoping" for violence at the DNC this august.

    can anyone defend that kind of rhetoric?

  • April 10, 2008

    12:05 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    p_myers661 writes:

    The DNC will be historical and hysterical.

    Hilary will do anything to grab the nomination including lie, cheat, threaten and throw a real tantrum.

    If she fails to get the nomination, she will work against Obama as hard as she can. It remains a puzzle whether or not Howard Dean is in her back pocket or not and what he will do.

    Look at the sound bites they have. The word bloodbath refers to the damage they are doing to their party. I'm one of those who hate McCain, no matter who wins this year we will have a liberal president, but my candidate bowed out with class even though he had a chance to get the nomination away from McCain. Better that we end up with a fool than we destroy the party.

    Hilary and Obama will snipe at each other. Then, because of rules to keep the stupid peasants who vote in primaries from selecting someone the "wise ones" in control of the party did not want to have the nomination, they invented two things. The first thing was the divided awarding of the delegates for each state. The second was the superdelegates. No matter who the voters in the primaries select, those superdelegates will be able to decide the matter.

    Blame Rush for Hilary still being a candidate and listen to him to understand that the bloodbath he anticipates is the reaction of the primary voters when they discover that their vote didn't mean a thing. Whichever candidate is nominated, there will be so many angry voters that McCain will be president. And I'm no happier about it than any democrat. I just know that either of the other two would be an even greater disaster.