What Numbers and History Have Taught Be About Elections In My Lifetime, Part 2: The Myth Of The Primary Creating Inferior Candidates

 

I have a friend I’ve known for a while. Every so often we talk about presidential politics. Like many Americans this individual is eternally dissatisfied with the leaders we keep getting ever four years. That individual thinks that the Republicans have become dominated by the far right and the Democrats by the far left. This individual has not liked any of the Presidents in the last several decades nor any of the major candidates who have run over the years.

These are opinions that many, if not most Americans share about politics today. But when I asked this person what candidate would be their ideal, that person didn’t have a ready answer. They said there wasn’t an elected official in either party that they thought was ideal with their political views on either side.

This attitude is shared by so many people I encounter on line, and it’s more prevalent on the far left then it is on the far right. I suspect that Democrats and Republicans have similar attitudes about the candidates that run every four years even before Trump became the perennial nominee. I’m certain that this is an attitude influenced by the media.

I don’t blame them for that attitude. What my problem comes down to is that they seem to be holding out for something perfect from their candidates. This became increasingly clear to me during all of the depressed attitude towards the Biden-Trump rematch over the past two years but I’ve sensed it in every single primary race leading up to the general election I’ve participated in and no doubt every one before that. There’s always an enthusiasm gap that I’ve sensed in so many people every election cycle and it wasn’t until my friend told me their problem with Presidential politics that I was able to put it into words.

There’s a historical anecdote about Lincoln during the Civil War. One of his colleagues was upset about how George McCellan, then the commander of all Union Armies, was handling the military. Lincoln, never McLellan’s biggest fan , asked who he should replace him with. “Anybody would be better” he was told. “I cannot replace him with anybody,” Lincoln said. “I must have somebody.”

That is the response that I keep thinking of every four years when it comes to the unhappiness so many people seem to have over my lifetime when it comes to the choices we get for our Presidential candidates. After the primaries come to an end, and all too frequently before they even begin, you get this attitude from the media, conservative, liberal or mainstream, from comedians on late night and from so many online commentators about how horrible these choices are, how tragic it is this is what America is faced with and we deserve something better. But whenever you ask them who or what that mystical candidate is their response is always not that far from the exchange above. The fact that they don’t have anything other than ‘anybody’ has never stopped them from being absolutely certain that individual is out there.

It’s bad enough that so many Americans are upset that ‘anybody’ is not on the ticket instead of the somebodies we have that so many of them have spent their lives refusing to vote. That many of them often then choose to complain that nothing ever changes in our country – and in many cases are the loudest voices – is even more troubling. But the most disturbing thing is just beneath the surface and that’s become particularly clear during primary campaigns.

At the core of this are two arguments involving them that among the media and experts are considered gospel The first is that the primary process has destroyed the quality of the candidates that we get as nominees. The second, which is closely related to the first, is that the system itself is so messy and complicated that it needs either a complete overhaul if not junked entirely.

In this article I intend to disprove the first ‘truth’ by using examples involving elections I participated it, a historical context to prove the fallacy in this argument and why this idea speaks more about the people who pontificate about it then any evidence in my lifetime.

Note: I’m excluding the 2016 election from this article because I intend to go into great detail about in a later one in this series.

I’m going to start this by placing this argument from the losing candidates in the three elections that immediately followed 2000. One of the arguments I heard over and over leading up to almost every bit of election coverage almost from the start of their hunt for the nomination to the moment they clinched it was that they were never given any real respect by anyone. Not the pundits, not the media, not political journalists. And that argument that always followed seemed to be that none of them were “good enough to win.”

That’s logic I’ve never gotten. They won the primaries, didn’t they? They must have been able to win over some people? That was actually part of the argument against them, and it’s the underlying part of so much of the paradox that so many people seem to have with the primary system: anyone who competes in them by definition must not be good enough to win an election. Clearly there’s something wrong with then if the primary voters have chosen them instead of that mystical candidate that so many people seem to think would be better. Who that candidate is they don’t know; they just know he’s not running. And if he was by definition, he’s not good enough. If you can follow that kind of logic, you must be either a talking head, an academic or an extremist on either political party because it’s baffling to me.

In 2004 Democratic primary voters made the unforgivable mistake of selecting John Kerry as their standard bearer. Clearly by choosing a man who was Lt. Governor of Massachusetts and had won (to that point) three consecutive elections as its Senator, he had no business running for the nation’s highest office. I mean sure within two months of taking office he was part of a committee that led to the unfolding of Iran Contra, had investigated Bush’s involvement in the BCCI affair that brought down lobbyists and was one of the most liberal members of the Senate in his voter record but what does any of this have to do with being a good Democrat, much less a President. What does sponsoring 330 bills in your first 20 years in Congress have to do with being a President anyway?

In 2008 John McCain was also unforgivably chosen by the Republicans as their Presidential nominee whose only qualification, according to most talking heads, was that he was seventy-two years old. I mean how dare a man who had represented Arizona in the House before taking over Barry Goldwater’s seats in the Senate have to do with the Presidency. Sure he voted in favor of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 and voted override Reagan’s veto, investigated the POW Affairs act that led to normalizing diplomatic relations with Vietnam, supported campaign finance reform which led to the McCain-Feingold bill and took on Big Tobacco. And he broke with the Bush administration on HMO reform, climate change and Gun control but he supported the Iraq War and the surge. Besides all he really did was get captured. (For the record, that’s not Trump I’m quoting. Harper’s wrote that in their argument against voting for McCain in their October 2008 issues)

And Mitt Romney? Seriously? Why should we vote for a man whose only qualification was being governor of Massachusetts for one term? I mean sure that’s as much elected experience as Barack Obama had when he ran for President in 2008 – actually it’s less because Romney didn’t first run for President until after he finished his term -  but how does being governor for one term qualify you to be President? Sure you created a health care system that was the model for Obamacare but you won’t take credit for it. (Granted neither did Obama.)

All of this is sarcastic of course but not by much. The resume of the first two men are among the most impressive of any candidate who ran for President in my lifetime, certainly more then either George W. Bush or Barack Obama when they were running for President for the first time. And they must have been convincing on the stump to win votes for primary voters. Yet somehow during this long period of primaries, they were no one’s ideal candidate for President. Mitt Romney’s a different story to be sure but his record is certainly similar to the other men who have received the nomination and won the Presidency – Jimmy Carter is the most prominent example. Yet even though they were qualified for the office in a way that many candidates who were their opponents for the nomination weren’t they always got lumped in with so many of them as being ‘inadequate’.

Which is baffling to me. Setting aside the mindset where running for President seems to mean you should be disqualified from doing so (that’s what seems to be the thinking of so many of anyone who runs for office in the first place) one of the arguments should be their qualifications to be President. But let’s just look at the records of three men who are considered by historians as among the greatest Presidents in history, all of whom were leaders of America during a national crisis.

Compared to his rivals for the Presidency Abraham Lincoln’s resume going into the 1860 convention was barely paper thin. He’d been an attorney in Illinois, a one-term Congressman (and that had ended in 1848) had served in the Illinois statehouse and had run an unsuccessful campaign for the Senate against Stephen Douglas in 1858. Compared to most of the other major Republican contenders – among them William Seward and Salmon P. Chase – he had no business being considered anything other than Illinois’s favorite son at the Republican convention.

Woodrow Wilson’s entire elected history going into the 1912 Democratic convention was that he had been elected governor of New Jersey in 1910. He’d barely been in office a year before he began to run for the Democratic nomination. Compared to Champ Clark, the Speak of the House and a twenty year veteran of Congress he had no business competing.

Franklin D. Roosevelt had a fairly impressive resume when he ran for the Democratic nomination in 1932. He’d served in the New York Legislature, had been Wilson’s assistant Secretary of the Navy and had served as Governor of New York. All of them, however, were offices his famous cousin Theodore had held in his life before becoming President. FDR had also been nominated as James W. Cox’s Vice President in 1920 but had been part of the biggest electoral landslide in history to that point. The whole reason the 38 year old FDR was chosen was because TR had been expected to be the GOP nominee for President in 1920 and they hoped the lure of the Roosevelt name would bring his supporters to the Democrats. (It really didn’t work.) FDR was more qualified when he ran for the Democratic nomination but no one could deny much of his early career had been possible because of his last name.

There’s an argument made among talking heads today that all three of these men could never win the Presidency today. That’s a false flag argument of course because it assumes the circumstances that led to all three men winning the White House would be the kind of things that led voters to choose them in that same period. It also leaves out the fact that their names are being brought up by their reputations as President and not their qualifications as candidates for office. And in all three cases there were things that many voters today would have difficulty with.

The lengths and breadth of Lincoln and Wilson’s political experience could each have fit on a postage stamp and still have had room. Neither had anywhere the kind of records that would have gotten them a Vice Presidential nomination in recent years. FDR was more qualified to an extent in 1932 but he was viewed by many columnists as a dilettante and seeming to breezy and glad-handing in his speeches. His last name helped him with Progressives but not necessarily his own family (there was a major schism between his branch of the family and Theodore’s descendants that never healed)

And it’s worth noting that in the case of Lincoln and Wilson their greatness in the eyes of history was not viewed by the electorate. Lincoln won the Presidency with less than forty percent of the popular vote, still the smallest percentage of any winning President and was built entirely on the split in the Democrats between the North and Southern branch. Lincoln wasn’t even on the ballot in the South. No one thought he could win reelection in 1864, not even him,  and there was an effort to name John C. Fremont as an alternative. Lincoln ran as a member of the Union Party which was a coalition of Republican and War Democrats. Even then he only managed to win reelection because of the multiple success on the battlefield for the Union.

Wilson only won the Democratic nomination after 45 ballots, the most of any candidate in the 20^th century. It was only because of the schism in the Republican Party between TR and Taft that he managed to win the Presidency. He got 43 percent of the vote to TR’s 26 and Taft’s 23; had the Republicans been united Wilson would have lost. As I mentioned in my first article, he barely won reelection four years later.

And for all of the enormity of FDR’s electoral wins he was as much hated by the people as he was loved by them. Many of them were Republicans, the wealthy and the media but there was just as many average citizens who hated him as well. He was referred to my so many as ‘That Man in the White House’ and it wasn’t just Republicans who felt that way. Democrats began to become hostile to him after the Court packing fight ended and many of them were not happy when he chose to run for a third term.

History judged all three of these men as great Presidents (though Wilson’s reputation has suffered in recent years) but that pays little attention to how they were viewed at the time by the electorate. (It also hides the fact that the electorate had no real choice in them as nominees for President in the first place, something I’ll get to into more detail in the next article.) And just as we can’t see history in reverse, we can’t project past candidates into the present and try to just them by today’s metric. Neither is fair but that is how so many people seem to look at it in regard to so many candidates today.

And it’s not like these men ran against unqualified candidates for the nomination either. Kerry’s opponents including Richard Gephardt, the House minority leader and a Congressman from 1977-2005 and Wesley Clark, Supreme Commander of NATO. McCain’s in 2008 including not only Romney but Fred Thompson who had been Senator from Tennessee and Republican council during Watergate as well, Sam Brownback Senator from Kansas and Ron Paul, one of the longest serving men in the House from Texas. Romney’s opponents including Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry who at that point had been elected Governor of Texas three consecutive terms (and whose last name was not Bush). You can say what you will about these men (and people will say a lot about them) but they had resumes that theoretically should have made them qualified to be President.

Yet time and again I keep hearing that the candidates who dare to run for President are ‘second string’ at best. This reached its ludicrous highpoint in my opinion when I was reading an interview of Seth Meyers in an entertainment magazine where he (along with entertainment personalities Desus and Mero) made it very clear that the Democrats had little chance of taking the White House back from Trump in 2020 because all of the candidates were the ones that were essentially ‘benchwarmers’. To be clear this article was published in January 2020 when Joe Biden was in the race.

My point isn’t that Biden proved them wrong but that they found Biden – who had been elected to the Senate six consecutive terms and had been Vice President under Obama who had won the Presidency twice – was lacking in their eyes as being a good candidate. And if a person whose been in Washington for half a century isn’t qualified to be President, then who could possibly meet that metric?

It’s for that reason I come back to where I started: the idea that somehow, somewhere in the minds of so many smart people, pundits and the electorate themselves is that every candidate who runs for office is lacking in some way. This feeling was always beneath the surface between the lead up to the 2024 election but its been there with every election I’ve participated in and always seems to be there. It’s the idea that the electorate is settling, that there are better candidates out there then the ones were getting. I might be willing to accept the latter if someone could actually come up with viable – or even unrealistic alternatives to the options we have.

But all we get is that vague term “Anybody would be better than what we have now.” That’s conceivable. But like a man who was considered unelectable himself when he ran for the nation’s highest office and now couldn’t win in today’s climate might have put it “We can not win with anybody. We must have somebody.”

In the next part in the series I will concede the current political primary system is the worst way to select a leader…except for all the others.