From the WSJ Opinion Archives
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Presidential Leapfrog
The nominating process gets curiouser and curiouser.
The way things are going, the first votes in the 2008 Presidential election may yet be cast in 2007, more than 10 months before the national elections next November. This is not an improvement.
In a little-noticed move this week, Wyoming Republicans moved their party conventions to January 5, beating out Michigan, which just moved its primaries to January 15. State laws in Iowa and New Hampshire require those states, in turn, to leapfrog Michigan and Wyoming, potentially pushing one or both elections into December. So voters in those two states might have to interrupt their holidays to participate in a Presidential primary campaign better held during a much less busy season.
This maneuvering continues a Presidential election process that is changing in ways that make it both longer, yet paradoxically less reflective, than ever. Sixty years ago, Presidential nominees were chosen largely by delegates to conventions held in late summer, between 60 to 90 days before the actual vote. That system gave us FDR, Truman and Ike, to name three better than average Presidents. It also gave us Warren Harding--but then no system is perfect.
In any event, this was deemed too beholden to insiders, so the Progressives lobbied for primaries to open the nominating process to more voters. Yet those primaries were also spread out, from March through the early summer, allowing candidates to adjust to a defeat, raise money between primaries, and even to enter at a late date.
President Lyndon Johnson didn't drop out of the race in 1968 until March, after Eugene McCarthy's surprise showing in the New Hampshire primary. Bobby Kennedy entered the race that same month, and he only emerged as a real threat to the nomination after winning in California in early June. (He was assassinated on the night of that victory.)
On the Republican side, Ronald Reagan lost to President Gerald Ford in New Hampshire in 1976. But he turned his campaign around with a victory in North Carolina in late March, based in part on his opposition to the Panama Canal treaty. That began a series of primary victories that left him only a handful of delegates short of winning the GOP nomination.
Both scenarios would be impossible this election cycle, when the party nominees will be decided in a flurry of primaries that may transpire over less than a month. The big states have tired of the attention devoted to puny Iowa and New Hampshire, and so have elbowed themselves into an earlier, and they hope more decisive, role. The candidates have responded by kicking off their campaigns even earlier. Some have been running for a year already.
Republican Fred Thompson--expected to formally announce next week--will test the proposition that you have to start that early. But he's going to have to raise a lot of money very fast under restrictive campaign-finance laws to be competitive in so many states so quickly after New Hampshire and Iowa. Only someone already famous--Al Gore or Newt Gingrich--could still decide to enter later this fall and have a chance.
To put it another way, this process is both too long and too constricted. It is too long in the sense that it starts the Presidential race more than two years before the actual vote. This shrinks the time for actual "governing," to the extent this still happens in Washington, with Senators like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden having to calibrate every utterance for its impact on their nomination chances. This has only made it harder this year for the parties to find any bipartisan common ground on Iraq, for example. Then once the nominees are all but picked next year on February 5, we will have another long 10 months of campaigning before November. No wonder the political pros call this "the permanent campaign."
But the process is also too constricted, because once the primary voting starts, it will be over in a flash. This makes it harder for a dark horse candidate to break through; even with an early victory, it might be too late to raise enough money to compete in the fast-following giant states.
It also gives Americans less chance to scrutinize the nominees once the actual balloting begins. Sure, voters may know the names of most of those who are running, but average, rational citizens lack the time or interest to focus until an election is nigh. A nominating primary gantlet of three to four weeks is the political equivalent of a blur. This means that crucial facts about a candidate's experience and character may not be discovered until he has already wrapped up the nomination.
We're not sure what can be done about all this. Both parties have conspired in the past in moving up the primary dates for their own competitive reasons (such as getting the intra-party disputes out of the way early when taking on a sitting President). And this year, both parties have threatened to punish state parties that move up their primaries to crowd the early small states--to no avail.
Perhaps it will all turn out for the best this time around. But if the process leaves one or both parties lukewarm about their nominees, it could also open the field for a third party candidate to make a run. This is the scenario that New York's billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has been eyeing. Pressure could also build for Congress to intervene and set some new campaign limits--which, in the usual Congressional fashion, could make things worse. It's not too early for the parties to start thinking how to organize things better for the 2012 campaign. On present course, they are making us nostalgic for conventions and smoke-filled rooms.
