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Picking candidates

By Jack M. Balkin

There was more than bit of derision of the procedure by which the Democratic Party picked its candidate in the spring. In particular, Republicans were praised for quickly wrapping up their contest by virtue of having adopted a first-past-the-post winner-take-all allocation for most of its primaries, whereas the Democrats adopted a proportional representation system. Thus John McCain won all of Missouri's delegates by winning, I believe, around 34% of the vote (with Mike Huckabee coming in second with around 31%). Those dumb Democrats, it was suggested, were simply creating a divided party well into June (and beyond?), while John McCain had all those months to preside over a unified party and then take advantage of Democratic ineptitude.

Except, of course, it didn't work out that way. Barack Obama is a far, far better campaigner (and debater) than he was at the beginning of the primary process, as is the case, for that matter, with Hillary Clinton. And the drawn-out process means that the Democratic candidate, whether Obama or Clinton, really had to visit and become familiar with the length and breadth of this complex country in a way that John McCain simply did not. Moreover, except for a few hold-outs, most of the Clintonites accepted the fact that she was beaten in a fair-and-square months-long process, just as would have been the case had she been able to win more delegates than Obama. The Democratic Party is the most united it has been in my lifetime.

McCain, on the other hand, by virtue of his decpetive victory--deceptive in the sense that he never came close to establishing himself as the favorite of a majority of all Republcian voters prior to all of the others pulling out--never really honed his skills for the fall campaign. Nor did he really have to dig deeply into finding out about much of the country. (Does he realize how truly atypical of the rest of the country Alaska is, for example?) And, to put it mildly, the Republican Party doesn't look that united right now, where several of its own candidates for the House and Senate seem more interested in highlighting their links with Obama than with McCain or, God forbid, George W. Bush.

I hope that the Democratic Party doesn't pull back from its policy of proportional representation in the primary process. Not only is it more democratic; it also has turned out to be very good for the Democratic Party (and, I think for the United States). It will be interesting to see what lessons the Republican Party learns from a process that gave them John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Full post as published by Balkinization on October 26, 2008 (boomark / email).