On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, I’m tempted to give the whole thing a pass. The Republican convention of last week was an unmitigated disaster. And we saw up close and personal what happens when an unpopular, and possibly unelectable, candidate runs the show.
We used to complain that the heavily scripted conventions of old were boring — “snoresville” — and so they may have been. But the runaway nonsense that ensues when an egotistical windbag takes over his party and excludes proper vetting of candidates, their families and their speeches has given us all pause. Anyone for the smoke-filled back rooms of yesteryear?
They at least produced willing and credible candidates who might be acceptable to the electorate at large. Now we are faced with a fairly even race between two of the most unpopular candidates in history. One is capable, experienced but deemed “untrustworthy” by her opponents; the other is a know-nothing TV personality and real estate developer with a hair-trigger temperament and absolutely no discernable understanding of history, not to mention foreign policy. What he has is money, power and name recognition, and the worst hairdo on the planet. Cartoonists love him.
So how did we get to this unenviable moment? Is this the product of technology run amok? Are errant emails to be the undoing of one candidate and her party’s show runner? On the brink of the Democratic convention, DNC chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz is forced to step down from her party position because hackers uncovered email evidence of her preference for one candidate over a formidable challenger. Really?
To say that we’ve become the laughing stock of the world would be an understatement. To understand how we arrived at this impasse, one should read Jonathan Rauch’s piece in the July/August issue of The Atlantic, titled “What’s Ailing American Politics?”
Rauch decries the systematic undoing of our political intermediation, which took many decades to build. And how did it die? “We reformed it to death.”
In the next paragraph, he writes, “Years before the Senate had to cope with Ted Cruz, it had to cope with Jesse Helms. The difference is that Cruz shut down the government, which Helms could not have done had he even imagined trying.”
In describing the difference between our Constitution and the British parliamentary system, he explains: The Constitution makes no provision for holding politicians accountable to one another. A rogue member of Congress can’t be fired by his party leaders, as a member of parliament can; a renegade president cannot be evicted in a vote of no confidence, as a British prime minister can. That explains quite a lot.
Parties, machines and hacks may not have been pretty, Rauch writes, but they did their job so well that the country forgot why it needed them.
“We reformed closed-door negotiations,” perhaps because of the fallout from the Watergate scandal. But “the idea that Washington would work better if there were TV cameras monitoring every conversation gets it exactly wrong,” he writes.
Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle once wrote, “The lack of opportunities for honest dialogue and creative give-and-take lies at the root of today’s dysfunction.” In hindsight, I suppose I would have to agree with that.
It has been my observation that power has now shifted from politicians and political parties to industry groups that hold government agencies’ feet to the fire. This is how we got regulatory compliance that is totally voluntary. It’s not working but that’s just my personal bias.
If the Atlantic article is too long for most readers, try Mark Shields’ column in the New York Times (just Google it). After last week’s Republican convention, under the heading “It’s Midnight in America,” it contrasts Ronald Reagan’s TV ad “It’s Morning in America” with the fear mongering of Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric.
In describing the convention of last week, Shields notes: Republicans blamed (Clinton) for everything from the decline in Sunday school attendance to an outbreak of ringworm in the Rocky Mountain states. He wonders if Democrats in Philadelphia will be equally lazy and predictable in basing the case for their party on Republican Trump’s moral and intellectual defects.
Surely Clinton’s humor will prevail to bring us a more entertaining week than last. Remember that historically the presidential candidate with the most optimistic view has won. We can only hope.