How does George Will know what the Founders intended if what they wrote insn't what they meant. Has he been listening to Anthony Scalia when he is channelling Thomas Jefferson?
This article was written in November. George Will should have called upon his powers of prescience to see that in the next year President Obama would deal with a faltering economy, withdraw troops from Iraq, start a peace process in the Middle East, tackle climate change, repair relations with our allies, promote health care reform, kill an ineffective missle defense system, effectivrely confront Iran... . It looks like Obama has accomplished a lot in the eight months he's been in office.
And - what has George Will accomplished in the last year? ....
THE LAST WORD
The Final Repudiation
Americans should ponder the profound implications of the long evolution, through six stages, of the presidential-selection process.
From the magazine issue dated Nov 17, 2008
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In a Presidential contest replete with novelties, none was more significant than this: A candidate's campaign—for his party's nomination, then for the presidency—was itself virtually the entire validation of his candidacy. Voters have endorsed Barack Obama's audacious—but not, they have said, presumptuous—proposition, which was: The skill, tenacity, strategic vision and tactical nimbleness of my campaign is proof that I am presidential timber.
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Because imitation is the sincerest form of politics, the 2008 campaign will not be the last in which such a proposition is asserted. Obama's achievement represents the final repudiation of the Founders' intentions regarding the selection, and hence the role, of presidents. So Americans should understand the long evolution of the selection process.
It is strange but true: Presidential politics, although of paramount importance, is a game without settled rules. More than two centuries after ratification of the Constitution, there is no stable system for selecting presidential candidates.
James W. Ceaser, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, notes that, contrary to conventional understanding, the Constitution created not three but four "national institutions." They are the Congress, the Supreme Court, the presidency—and the presidential selection system, based on the Electoral College. "The question of presidential selection," Ceaser writes, "was just that important to the Founders."
Under their plan, the nomination of candidates and the election of the president were to occur simultaneously. Electors meeting in their respective states, in numbers equal to their states' senators and representatives, would vote for two people for president. The electors' winnowing of aspirants was the nomination process. When the votes were opened in the U.S. House of Representatives, the candidate with a majority would become president, the runner-up would become vice president. If no person achieved a majority of electoral votes, the House would pick from among the top five vote getters. Note well: The selection of presidential nominees was to be controlled by the Constitution.
The Founders' intent, Ceaser writes, was to prevent the selection of a president from being determined by the "popular arts" of campaigning, such as rhetoric. The Founders, Ceaser says, "were deeply fearful of leaders deploying popular oratory as the means of winning distinction." That deployment would invite demagoguery, which subverts moderation. "Brilliant appearances," wrote John Jay in The Federalist Papers 64, "… sometimes mislead as well as dazzle." By telling members of the political class how not to get considered for the presidency, the Founders hoped to (in Ceaser's words) "make virtue the ally of interest" and shape the behavior of that class.
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