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? ....
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The Final Repudiation
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The Founders' presidential selection system, the first of six the nation has had so far, was feasible only when it was dispensable—in the first two elections, when George Washington was everyone's preference. By the time he left office in 1797, political parties, which were not anticipated when the Constitution was drafted just 10 years earlier, were coalescing.
Subsequent systems included: The selection of presidential candidates by the parties' congressional caucuses (1796–1820); nonpartisan selection (1824–28); national nominating conventions controlled by parties' organizations (1832–1908); a system of such conventions leavened by popular choice through a few state party primaries and caucuses (1912–68)—in 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination without entering any primaries; since 1972, selection of nominees entirely by popular choice. Thus have conventions been reduced from deliberative bodies to mere ratifying bodies.
The brief nonpartisan system of candidate selection alarmed some thoughtful people because it left ambitious individuals unconstrained by any dependency. Hence the desire to involve the parties in presidential selection, thereby requiring aspirants to submit to principles and agendas not entirely their own. From 1832 until 1936, Democratic conventions required a nominee to win two thirds of the delegates. This constrained candidates by essentially giving a veto to any geographic region. Barack Obama completed the long march away from the Founders' intent. Most recent presidential candidacies have been exercises of personal political entrepreneurship; his campaign, powered by the "popular art" of oratory, was the antithesis of the Founders' system.
The Progressives of 100 years ago wanted to popularize presidential selection by rewarding candidates gifted in the popular art of inflaming excitement through oratory. They opened a door through which, eventually, strode George Wallace, Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Howard Dean and others.
Ceaser notes that the candidate whose path to the presidency most resembled Obama's was Jimmy Carter. He, too, used an intensely personal and inspirational appeal to compensate for a thin résumé. Having courted the public with flattering rhetoric—promising "a government as good as the American people"—Carter came a cropper as president, partly because he was a one-man political startup. He had been selected by a process that rewarded running as a solitary savior, offering his personal qualities—his supposed moral excellence—as the key to national improvement.
Sensible Americans hope President-elect Obama has a better fate. They also should ponder the implications of the selection process that begins again, soon.
© 2008
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