Publication: Conservative Review
Primary Confusions | |
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THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW
January 18, 2008
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Primary Confusions
By William F. Buckley
Sebastian Mallaby, a journalist for The Washington Post,
writes to formulate, or rather reformulate, the complaint
we are entitled to make on the matter of our primary
practices. Mallaby reminds us that if three people are
running for office, we can't know which of the three is
the true favorite of the voters. You can't merely subtract
the vote for the man who came in third and apportion it to
scale as between No. 1 and No. 2, because if No. 3 had not
been in the race, more of his voters might have gone for
No. 2 than for No. 1. And the confusion deepens if there
are more than three candidates. In Iowa, the Democrats had
eight, the Republicans seven.
Most European countries don't have this problem because
there is no line on the ballot for "prime minister." It is
left to the majority political party to decide who shall
be its leader, and except in his own district he does not
face local popularity contests. The operating thesis is
that unless the party puts forward a leader who is
attractive to the electorate as a whole, the candidate
will wear down the party's popularity, and a contending
party will step in.
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We have the additional problem of the advantage given to
candidates who are effective in the early contests. To show
up well in Iowa means much more than to win Iowa delegates.
It propels the victor to a strategic eminence that can
hugely affect subsequent votes. There are candidates who
kill themselves to raise $5 million or $10 million to
advertise their attractions to the next set of primary
voters a week hence. That itself is a distracting inter-
ference in the attempt to divine the popular will.
Efforts have been made to limit the sums that can be spent
in election contests. These efforts have failed, and
probably should fail, inasmuch as the regulation of money
spent on an election is not automatically a means of
reducing extraneous factors in political appeal. The
election process is a market exercise. The voter is given
the choice of Clinton, Obama or Edwards, and it is left
exclusively to him what weight he wishes to attach to
Clinton's experience, Obama's exotic racial background or
Edwards' good looks. That can't be changed, the effect of
individual tastes, even if they are eccentric.
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But the critics are on firm ground if they ask simply, as
Mallaby does, that a primary winner should not be judged
pre-eminent if he (read he/she) was competing in a race
in which there were more than two candidates. Which raises
concrete questions about the current scene.
Would Clinton have prevailed in New Hampshire if Obama had
been her only opponent? Do not go off self-satisfied with
the assumption that the problem would be solved by contriv-
ing a means of eliminating the factor of Edwards et al.
That could be done by reforms mandating a runoff between
the two top vote-getters, as they do in France. But that
would leave unanswered the question: Are the voters in a
local primary being deprived of representation consistent
with their potential strength in a national contest?
One approach would grant points to primary candidates, to
be added up at the end of the line. So that such as Mr.
Edwards don't just get eliminated; they store up points
which they can invoke at the final clearinghouse of the
national convention.
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Well, most of these projected reforms, whatever their
theoretical appeal, simply aren't going to happen unless a
demonstrable distortion should wrench from favor existing
procedures. But of course our system has means of coping
with, if not eliminating, crippling paradoxes. It was not
so long ago, in American history, that the next candidate
of the party in power was simply the person ordained by
the incumbent. It was in part a recognition of the awful
likelihood that Henry Wallace would be the Democratic
candidate succeeding FDR that brought on the switch to
Harry Truman as vice president in 1944.
We do not face such contingencies in 2008. What we do face
is several more months of the kind of confusion that can
frustrate the modern American voter.
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