Our Primary System

Every four years in this country, we get to elect a new President. This is one of the many good things about our system of government. We don't have to suffer under bad or corrupt leadership for indefinate periods of time. If you don't like the current President, take heart because you'll always be able to elect a new one in a few years. Throughout our history, we've had some great leaders. Washington and Lincoln spring to mind immediately. But, we've also had some really lousy ones; George W. Bush, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan, to name a few. Of course who your favorite President is, or whether you like the current one is always up for debate and it's almost always, at least partially, a matter of opinion.

Who was the last great President? Some would argue Kennedy, others FDR, others woudl say Reagan, and you might even get a few people to say they think it was Bill Clinton. However, I don't believe any of these would be universally accepted as our last great President. In fact, I think the last man that you could get the largest number of people to agree on would be our friend Honest Abe Lincoln. Somehow, our country has gotten by for almost 150 years without a President that is nearly universally haled as a great Leader. Of course, every President has his detractors and some were more universally liked than others, but the bottom line is that our system rarely seems to produce true greatness in our leaders.

I think that the main cause of this is our system of primary elections. We have a two-party system in this country and each party gets to nominate a candidate for the highest office in the land. Unfortunately, the nominating process seems to ensure that we end up with the most marginal candidate from each party. Not necessarily the best, in many cases, not even the most electable, just the one that managed to emerge from the fray in his party's primary.

I see a couple of major issues with the primary process. The first is that it causes division and dissension within the ranks of each party. Since most members of the same party have similar stances on the most important issues, each candidate has to try to find a way to distinguish himself from his opponent(s). This leads to the politics of personal attack. The candidates look for ways to discredit their opponents, to make them look bad, and they attempt to highlight minor differences between themselves and their opponents. What we end up with is dirty politics and dirty campaign tactics.

The second big issue I see with the primary system is the role of the media. Primary campaigns move from state to state and proceed rather slowly. The early primaries are held one state at a time, and often in places that are not likely to be indicative of the way the majority of the populace would vote if given the chance. In this age of the 24 hour news cycle, the media always has to have something to talk about, so they spend their time highlighting minor differences between candidates, and talking about personalities and human interest stories much more than issues. Furthermore, the media has a tendency to decide how they think someone should be portrayed, then make their perception into reality.

There are numerous examples of this. In 2004 Howard Dean was a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, he gave a speech after narrowly losing the Iowa caucuses, in which he showed enthusiasm and emotion in trying to fire up his supporters. The media decided that he didn't look "Presidential" in this speech and they proceeded to bury him. In current primaries, this effect is just as clear. The media decided early on that the Democratic primary was going to be a race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, they had a perfect story, a black man and a woman (two groups that had never been represented in the White House) were both viable candidates for the Democratic nomination. That's how the story was presented, and John Edwards simply became "that other guy who refuses to give up." Edwards consistently gets around 20% in the polls and he may be the most electable (good looking southern democrat who speaks with an accent) and probably also the most "democratic" (e.g. most liberal) of the three candidates, yet he barely gets mentioned in the media because it would distract from their perfect Hillary vs. Obama story.

What we end up with is essentially a system where the media picks our candidates for us. Which ties us into our final problem with the current construction of the primary system. The general public tends to have something of a herd mentality. Most people don't want to go through the effort of thinking about the issues or the candidates for themselves (and of course, it's hard for primaries to be about issues anyway since the candidates opinions are likely to be very much alike), instead they just follow the pack. So, we have these early primaries in out of the way places like Iowa and New Hampshire and the media anoints their winners as the "frontrunners." Then, since everyone wants to vote for a winner, voters in the later primaries tend to vote for these frontrunners and all of a sudden we find ourselves with the most marginal candidate on each side.

I know this commentary probably sounds pretty pessimistic. In most cases like this, I don't have all the answers, nor is the purpose of this blog to offer answers, rather it's to get people thinking, but in this case I will offer a couple of possibilities and you, the reader, can decide what you think or even discuss it in the comments section. I see 3 possible reforms to the primary system; 1) Hold every primary across the country on the same day, just like we do with the general election, 2) Scrap the whole primary system and hold two elections about a month apart. In the first election anyone from any party can run and if anyone gets more than 50% of the vote he (or she) wins outright. If no one gets to 50%, a run-off election is held between the top 2 candidates, even if they're both from the same party. 3) We eliminate the primary system altogether. Each state elects delegates to the national conventions, and those delegates hold meetings and discussions at the convention, then select a nominee.

None of these is perfect, but I think they would probably all produce better candidates and less overall rancor than the current system. What do you think?