Predictable as Wrestling and Only a Fraction as Entertaining, Why Have Conventions?

The humorless and taciturn 19th-Century President James K. Polk once suffered through a performance of jugglers at the White House and when asked his reaction replied, “It was innocent enough, but I felt the time unprofitably spent.” After having their favorite television shows preempted by the windy Democratic extravaganza in Atlanta, many Americans are probably asking themselves whether the time that was passed watching the convention was profitably spent.

In light of the fact that the last six Presidents were nominated as the result of winning more primary elections than their rivals, it seems strange that we persist in this political fiction whose main beneficiaries are the liquor and hotel industries, the enterprising prostitutes who typically descend on a convention town and a handful of big-name journalists. The reporters spend two weeks hunched over their lap-top word processors giving the American people breathless accounts of events whose outcome is about as mysterious as professional wrestling--but only a fraction as entertaining.

If it were only the case of a few thousand political hangers-on getting together for a few days of partisan bloviating, the events would indeed be harmless. But conventions are now dangerous anachronisms that have little positive to contribute and can conceivably cause great harm to the electoral process.

It is important to bear in mind that the last time a presidential convention actually chose a party nominee was in 1952. Every subsequent nominee has been the choice of voters casting ballots in primary elections.

But as conventions appeared to be going the way of torchlight parades, journalists and officials of the national party organizations bent every effort to gull us into thinking that these anti-democratic relics really had some decisive effect. That is the only explanation for the pre-primary ritual that takes place every four years: the portentous prediction of a brokered convention. The scenarios follow the same dreary logic. This year it was that no Democrat could transcend his membership in the club of “dwarfs” and that the job of picking the nominee would necessarily fall to some unnamed party brokers, a collection of fat-cat Washington lawyers and faceless but influential party officials.

What makes this brokered-convention talk so much nonsense is that in American politics today the appearance of democratic legitimacy is paramount. Imagine the burden that would be borne by the standard bearer who received his nomination from a brokered convention. It would be like a return to nomination by the oligarchic caucus system that prevailed when the party’s senators and House members chose the nominee.

The so-called super-delegate system used by the Democrats since 1984 is indeed a mild check on primary elections producing a lost-cause candidate. But few people have given any thought to the consequences of what would happen if super delegates, these Democratic officeholders and party bureaucrats not selected by the voters, actually tried to defy the will of the electorate. The possibility probably crossed a few minds when the Rev. Jesse Jackson gave party leaders some anxious moments after his victory in Michigan. His surprising triumph there raised the possibility that he could be stopped only at the convention with super-delegate votes. Michael S. Dukakis’ victory in New York lessened that threat, but as the Massachusetts governor began his inexorable march to the nomination, the convention began to look like the place where Jackson would make a last-ditch stand.

Knowing that the media would have an overwhelming interest in a contentious convention, Jackson pouted, sulked, postured and filled the media with Delphic statements about what Dukakis would have in store for him in Atlanta if the clergyman were not given his due. Armed with self-serving data suggesting that it was really he and not Dukakis who was the people’s choice, Jackson went about organizing his cross-country procession to the convention to the delight of reporters hungry for any scrap of controversy.

In any sensible system Dukakis would simply have claimed victory after the final round of primaries in June and been certified as the nominee on the strength of having won pluralities in more states than his rivals. The only value that conventions seem to have nowadays is as showcases for the losers to strut their stuff, usually to the disadvantage of the nominee. Indeed, at the last three Democratic conventions the nominee left the convention having stirred less passion in the delegates than his principal rival. Such a system breeds in the followers of the losing contestants a false hope that a convention can somehow overturn the results of a primary. In the case of the Jackson delegates this year it was an especially cruel delusion.

No, a convention is not just time unprofitably spent. It is an anachronism from the days when party leaders commanded influence and when the will of the people to give us nominees was not trusted. The convention needs to be relegated to the museum of American political antiquities.