Fiddling with the Rules

If you talk to your Democratic friends they will sometimes wander off into a discussion of voting processes: the wonders of proportional voting and the single transferable vote.

All very well and good, as the British would say, but it rather misses the point of voting, and that is to create a winner.

Politics, I like to say, is civil war by other means.  Thus every election is, in its charming way, a metaphorical civil war led by the great barons of the realm.  The fight might be between Baron Reagan and Baron Mondale or between Baron Clinton and Baron Bush.  The great thing is to have a decisive result that is accepted by the vassals of each great lord.

Of course, sometimes the result is really close, and even the dullest person can see that with a little tweak of the rules, they could have won. But never mind; there is always next time.

That’s what happened in the 1960 presidential election.  There was less than 0.5 percent in the popular vote between Kennedy and Nixon and clear indication of chicanery in Illinois and Texas.  But Nixon conceded the election and everyone went home.

In 2000 the election was just as close, but Al Gore did not concede.  The result has been 8 years of political trench warfare, with Democrats—Democrats!—accusing the other party of stealing the election.

Democrats tend to feel that democracy can be improved by changing the rules to ensure more fairness, or more genuine democracy.  But the problem is that they miss the forest for the trees.  It would be nice to have the best possible expression of the people’s will, but it is really important that there is a clear winner that everyone can accept.

It’s hard for Democrats to manipulate the rules of US elections, but it is easy for them to manipulate the rules of their party elections.  In the current presidential cycle anyone can see what a mess this has got them into, as Donald Lambro relates.  Today we have a situation in which the delegates chosen in Michigan and Florida are disqualified because the primaries were too early for the Democrats’ taste.  And the proportional representation rules mean that the winner of a primary does not capture all the delegates in a state but only a majority.

Apart from the fight over Michigan and Florida, the Democrats’ proportional delegate-selection process has resulted in a race where neither Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton nor Sen. Barack Obama can pull clear of the other, and that may put the almost 800 superdelegates in the position of effectively choosing the party’s nominee at the convention in August, regardless of the primary results.

So, after all this fiddling with the rules we have a situation where the nominee of the Democratic Party may be selected by politicians in a smoke-filled room, which everyone agrees is a Bad Thing.  After all, that’s what the rules were intended to prevent!

In the Republican Party we believe in playing the game according to the rules.  We don’t expect to get to Nirvana with perfect rules; we just acknowledge the need for rules, some kind of rules, and we believe in sticking to them.

So it couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of folks.  Dems everlastingly tweak the rules in search for an elusive “fairness” and end up tainting the result of the whole process.

Of course, back in the good old days, in the Civil War era, people would split parties at the drop of a hat and hold national conventions all the time.  Nobody worried about the exact fairness of the rules.  You announced a convention, you ordered up the special trains on the cool new railroads to get the delegates to the convention, and then you sat back and waited for people to turn up.  Then you had a grand old political brawl for a week.  Then everyone went home.

That was politics.