McClatchy Newspapers
Friday 25 January 2008
Washington - What happens if the primaries don't produce presidential nominees for one party - or the other - or both?
For Democrats, the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama race could continue through the primaries. If John Edwards stays in, he could win enough delegates to prevent either Clinton or Obama from securing enough convention delegates to win the nomination.
On the Republican side, the once implausible seems possible. Three candidates - Mike Huckabee, John McCain and Mitt Romney - each have won important early contests. All show strength among disparate party constituencies. A fourth candidate, Rudy Giuliani, hasn't seriously competed in any primaries yet. It's possible that the four could split primary wins - and delegates - all the way through the primary season, leaving none with a majority of delegates.
Suddenly those summer conventions - ridiculed in recent years as four-day parties with scripted outcomes - could matter: Delegates might have to stay awake and sober long enough to choose a nominee.
"It's not so amazing," said R. Craig Sautter, who's written three books on presidential nominating conventions. "Any time you have more than two candidates who are strong, you have the possibility of nobody going into the convention with enough delegates."
It hasn't been that way for a long while.
The last truly contested convention was 1976, when Republicans gathered in Kansas City. Former California Gov. Ronald Reagan fought President Gerald Ford all the way through the primaries. Ford had just enough delegates to win entering the convention. Reagan worked hard to woo some away; Ford worked equally hard to keep them. Ultimately, Ford won by a slender margin on the first ballot of delegates.
The last time a convention went beyond the first ballot for the top spot on a ticket was in 1952, when it took three ballots for Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson to win the Democratic nomination. Republicans went three ballots in 1948 to give New York Gov. Tom Dewey the nomination over Ohio Sen. Robert Taft.
Such excitement was once the norm, in an era when primaries mattered little because powerful local bosses controlled vast numbers of delegates who generally were party hacks. Back then, conventions were vehicles to wield power and settle scores.
Even Franklin Roosevelt had to wheel and deal his way to the Democratic nomination on four ballots in Chicago in 1932. (Until 1936, Democrats required nominees to have the support of two-thirds of the delegates; now, both parties require simple majorities.)
In 1924, Democrats went through 103 ballots over nine days in New York to settle on John W. Davis, a Wall Street lawyer, one-term congressman and former ambassador to Great Britain. That ended the brutal duel between the two leading candidates, New York Gov. Al Smith and Californian William McAdoo, a former secretary of the Treasury, which was heightened by the fact that many delegates were Ku Klux Klan members virulently opposed to Smith, a Roman Catholic.
"They were exhausted; people were exasperated," Sautter said. "The party was being torn apart on national radio. Davis was a person who was above the fray. He was respected by all, and the party turned to him."
Davis then lost the presidency to Calvin Coolidge, winning only 29 percent of the vote.
It's unlikely that 2008 would see a return to bosses sitting in smoke-filled rooms choosing compromise nominees like Davis. (Another such nominee, Warren G. Harding, was chosen after 10 ballots by Republicans in 1920.) Party reforms of the 1970s ensure that most delegates are committed to individual candidates, not controlled by party leaders.
Such reforms came about after 1968, when after the assassination of Robert Kennedy, Democrats nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, even though he hadn't really competed in primaries.
"A combination of the civil rights era, the war in Vietnam and the fact that the boss era was ending" sparked reforms, said Terry Madonna, the director of the Center for Politics & Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. "It was an effort to open (conventions) up to a wider group of constituents, more demographically balanced."
As primaries gained importance, conventions became little more than marketing opportunities for the political parties.
Still, a candidate would have to make deals to get over the top in a brokered convention this year. Most likely, candidates in third place or lower in the delegate count would agree to throw their support to the first- or second-place finishers on the second ballot in exchange for ... something.
Democrats also have 796 "super-delegates," generally elected officials who likely would want to ensure a clean win for the nominee and avoid a nationally televised fracas at the Denver conclave. Unlike delegates chosen in primaries, they're officially unpledged - even if they've endorsed a candidate. Democrats require 2,025 delegates for the nomination.
Republicans don't have super-delegates, but the rules on how delegates vote are basically left to the state and territory parties. More than 650 GOP delegates could arrive at the Minneapolis-St. Paul convention unpledged to any candidate, while more could be only informally bound to vote for a candidate, according to Jay Cost, a University of Chicago political science graduate student writing for www.realclearpolitics.com. Republicans require 1,191 delegates for the nomination.
"Super-delegates could be described as an elitist check on the Democratic electorate, while the Republican side is more a maze of 54 different schemes," Cost said.
The result, Madonna said: "Not only do we not know who would broker a convention without the old bosses. We're not even sure what would happen on a first ballot."
GOPers Debate (Nicely) in Florida; Here Are the Whoppers of the Night
By David Corn
Mother Jones Magazine Blog
Friday 25 January 2008
At Thursday night's Republican presidential debate, the GOP contenders did their best not to make any news. No one attacked anyone; no one disagreed on any major policy matter - except regarding a proposal to establish a national catastrophic insurance fund that would back up private insurance firms. (Rudy Giuliani, playing to Florida homeowners, voiced his support for it; Mitt Romney supported the general notion; John McCain attacked legislation that would set up such a fund as a $200 billion boondoggle.) Generally, the candidates made up a chorus for tax cuts and fighting - make that, winning - the Iraq war. (Then there was Ron Paul.) At times, the candidates hailed their rivals. It was so.... un-Democratic. No nastiness - even though McCain and Romney, essentially tied for first place in the Florida polls, have been hurling negative ads at each other. (A Romney ad assails McCain for flip-flopping on tax cuts; a McCain spot blasts Romney for...flip-flopping on tax cuts. McCain is actually comparing Romney to John Kerry.)
If you were forced to pick a winner - and in the absence of policy disputes, the debate was all about the horse race - you'd probably have to choose Romney, who seemed quasi-commanding and who this night, for some reason, looked more like Hollywood's idea of a president than usual. But no candidate hurt his own prospects. That doesn't mean, though, they didn't come out with some whoppers. Here's a sampling:
- Moderator Tim Russert asked McCain about a comment McCain had supposedly made - "I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues; I still need to be educated" - and McCain shot back, "I don't know where you got that quote from; I'm very well-versed in economics." Well, McCain did tell the Baltimore Sun, "The issue of economics is something that I've really never understood as well as I should." So much for being "well-versed."
- Asked whether it was un-American for U.S. banks to seek infusions of billions of dollars in capital from foreign sources, Giuliani said there was nothing wrong with that as long as "they're transparent." Giuliani, though, still refuses to be transparent about his own multi-million-dollar business dealings, declining to release information about the clients and foreign officials he has worked with as a consultant.
- McCain said that the invasion of Iraq was justified because Saddam Hussein was "hell-bent on acquiring" weapons of mass destruction. Actually, he wasn't. Saddam might have desired WMDs. But for years prior to the invasion, the Iraqi dictator had suspended his WMD program and done nothing to pursue WMDs, according to the final report of Charles Duelfer and his Iraq Survey Group.
- Mike Huckabee, voicing his support for Bush's invasion of Iraq, said that just because the United States didn't find WMDs in Iraq that "doesn't mean it wasn't there." The aforementioned Duelfer report - and Duelfer took over the Iraq Survey Group as a hawk who had believed Saddam possessed WMDs - made it clear that Saddam not only had no weapons in the years leading up to the war, he had no WMD program. In other words, there were no WMDs to be found in Iraq - period.
- Romney praised Bush for mounting the Iraq war and making sure al Qaeda could not gain "a safe haven" in Iraq "for launching attacks against us." That was certainly not an issue prior to the invasion. Saddam had no operational ties with al Qaeda. And now there's little, if any chance, that the small and unpopular al Qaeda outfit in Iraq could take over Iraq, pushing aside the Shiites, the Sunnis, and the Kurds.
- Romney claimed that under Hillary Clinton's universal health care proposal, everybody will get their coverage "from the government." Here's how Clinton describes it: "If you have a plan you like, you keep it. If you want to change plans or aren't currently covered, you can choose from dozens of the same plans available to members of Congress, or you can opt into a public plan option like Medicare." That's not a government-only plan.
- Huckabee said that Americans "ought to be able to respect people who don't have any [faith]." Yet in a book he co-wrote in 1998, Huckabee huffed, "Men who have rejected God and do not walk in faith are more often than not immoral, impure, and improvident (Gal. 5:19-21). They are prone to extreme and destructive behavior, indulging in perverse vices and dissipating sensuality (1 Cor. 6:9-10)." That just doesn't come across as a respectful attitude regarding people who don't have faith.
But the candidates sure did behave nicely.
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