What Numbers and History Have Taught Me About Elections, Part 4: A New Yorker Tells You What He Knew About Both Candidates in 2016

 

Over the years I know that my positions, which are that of a centrist, have gotten me labeled as conservative by some very angry people. And considering how much I have attacked members of ‘the Squad’ and Justice Democrats in recent articles, I suspect in some circles I might well be considered both a racist and a sexist. This article is likely to make many believe the latter more strongly.

So to be clear: some of the most capable and brilliant elected officials in my lifetime of observing – let’s say the last quarter century have been women. Given the conditions she has had working against her even before January 6^th, Nancy Pelosi is one of the greatest Speakers of all time, perhaps since Sam Rayburn. The Democratic Party has an extraordinary group of female governors on its roster who may very well have a future in national politics. Gretchen Whitmer is the most well-known, but others include Katie Hobbs of Arizona and Laura Kelly of Kansas. There are several more than capable women in the Senate who may very well end up on the Democratic ticket in the next decade. In my home state Kristen Gillibrand will probably be moving up in the leadership roles in the years to come and Amy Klobuchar and Tammy Baldwin seem very likely to be prominent. All three are up for reelection and with the exception of Baldwin, are among the safer seats this quarter.

One has to respect the stand that Liz Cheney took over the last several years, regardless of what you felt about her before January 6^th. Nikki Haley will likely run for President again someday and demonstrated and ability to be the new face of the GOP. It’s conceivable Kelly Ayotte, who has been a force in New Hampshire politics, might be as well.

With that mind I will bring you back to November of 2000. Because even though I was a registered Democrat for my first election when I went into the ballot I voted a straight Democratic ticket – with one critical exception. The first vote I cast in a Senate election was for Rick Lazlo. I found him reprehensible and a horrible candidate for elected office. But there was no way in hell I was going to cast my vote for Hilary Clinton.

As someone who’s spent his adult life in New York well before 2016 I had more first-hand knowledge of both of the major candidates for the President before they ended up being the nominees of their tickets. And very early in my life well before I ever voted in any election I knew that these two people who were different in every major way, were alike in one essential one: their personality was completely manufactured.

Anyone who lived in New York knew well before The Apprentice debuted what a complete and utter fraud the perception of Trump as a successful businessman was. I’m pretty sure if you asked any New Yorker to compare him to anyone during the 1990s and 2000s it would have been George Steinbrenner. Both men were among the most hated New Yorkers for a very specific reason: Steinbrenner had taken charge of a beloved institution – the Yankees – and essentially made them a tool for his massive ego. When I moved to New York in 1990 the Yankees were a joke and Steinbrenner was probably the most hated man in New York City. Trump was, even before he ever considered running for President, just as loathed. Saturday Night Live had been mocking him for much of the 1980s and 1990s for his tabloid behavior and his utter contempt for business practices. (Phil Hartman, in my opinion, did the best and most accurate impression of Trump)

Pop culture did much to improve both men’s reputation: Steinbrenner’s portrayal on Seinfeld made him seem more likable (as well as the fact that the Yankees managed to win four World Series in five years after not having won a championship since 1978) and the last decade of his ownership did much to whitewash what a monster he’d been for the first twenty years of his ownership. As we all know The Apprentice essentially made Trump relevant in a way he hadn’t been outside of New York and whitewashed most of his behavior in the past twenty years as well. Well before he considered running for President, the impression America had was that he was a great businessman and man of the people, something anyone who’d lived in New York knew was a front.

Hilary Clinton’s persona in public life was just as manufactured but because it was so amorphous it was harder for most Americans to realize. For me it was simple and it crystalized during the Monica Lewinsky affair. When Bill and Monica were jokes of every late night comic throughout 1998 and well up to the impeachment the fact that Hilary Clinton stood by her man was considered noble. I knew what it was and it was confirmed when she announced to run for the Senate in New York, a state which was as much her home as it had been Bobby Kennedy’s when he ran for it in 1964.

Loathing Hilary had become a standard well before she ran for public office, and it was usually framed in terms of sexism. For me my loathing was simple and it became completely solidified over the next decade. Hilary Clinton, from the moment she stepped into public life when Bill ran for President in 1992, had one goal and one goal only. She wanted to be President. Not the first woman President, though she leaned hard into that goal in 2008 and 2016. President.

To obtain that goal she would be just as much a political animal as any man who has ever sought the office: she ran for Senate in a deep blue state because it helped her long-term ambitions and she was more likely to win if she ran in Arkansas. She advocated strongly for the War in Iraq when it was suitable and against it when the tide was against it. She would work with Republicans and other Democrats when it suited her needs and call them her enemies when members of either party attacked her. And she never had a theme for either of her Presidential campaigns, only the aura of inevitability and entitlement.

All of this was bad enough before you get to the fact that Hilary Clinton was a terrible on the stump. She didn’t have her husband’s empathy or Barack Obama’s oratory. She didn’t have the compassion that Joe Biden did or the ability to inspire voters the way Sanders did. I think everyone who campaigns for the Presidency looks staged and phony more often then they look genuine. But with Hilary she never looked anything other than, to quote one description of Tom Dewey “like someone who had just been given a big shove from behind.”  Hilary had no gift for policy, no ability to engage and in both her campaigns for President she never had a good theme or an ability to connect with voters.

I think Hilary just wanted to be president, full stop. She didn’t want to do good with the office, she didn’t want to break the glass ceiling, she didn’t want to change the world. I think all she wanted was to be President. That’s why she never divorced Bill, even after she won the Senate. I would have had more respect for her if she had the day she took office in 2001: it would have shown she didn’t need him anymore.

That’s the thing about 2016: it was as much about the Clinton brand as it was the Trump brand. Hilary was running on her last name. That was the biggest problem with her campaign both in 2008 and 2016: in an era where we had gotten very sick of legacies after W’s administration, the idea of another kind of restoration had less appeal. And because Hilary was essentially relying on the goodwill of her husband to carry her to the Presidency – far more than W had his father’s  - she was never able to come up with a real identity outside of it. The first time around Barack Obama – who regardless of his flaws was a new and different voice – was capable of reaching people that she never could. Hilary seemed unwilling to accept that fact and as a result made Obama battle right to the end of the primaries before finally conceding. Obama was far too generous when he made her Secretary of State, considering her behavior towards him in the primaries. And she was no doubt doing it so that she could remain politically relevant when his term ended.

I remember much of the leadup to the 2016 Democratic primaries: Hilary had the aura of inevitability and no one was looking forward to it, certainly not the Democrats. Everyone did their part and got out of her way with the exception of Bernie Sanders. I will always be convinced that so much of the vote for Sanders during the primary were anti-Hilary rather than pro-Sanders; I’m also convinced had a more popular candidate run for the nomination – Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren – Hilary would have been flattened in the primary. She spent the entire primary campaign as if she had already been elected and this was all a formality: she campaigned even worse then in 2008, perhaps because she knew no matter what happened she was going to be the nominee. It must have struck her as annoying that Sanders was not only popular but stayed in  the race until the end; the irony in the situation completely escaped her.

During the 2016 campaign I remember that the mood was similar to 2000: no one really wanted either candidate to win. Trump had already demonstrated in the primary how horrible a human being he was and how much that horrible behavior was found enduring to the Republican voter. If nothing else Hilary should have realized that she should have considered that you had to take Trump’s appeal seriously and made more of an effort to provide a contrast to the hate he was spewing. All she did however was provide her own kind of vituperative rhetoric, condemning not only Trump but those who were deluded enough to vote for him. “We cannot trust Donald Trump with nuclear weapons!” is the most famous line Hilary came up with, and the thing is that was only a reason to vote against Trump, not for Hilary.

And because she suffered from that same delusion she campaigned with that same note of inevitability. She never came up with a theme for her campaign, arguing entirely against Trump and decided that she had no reason to campaign as if it was a close election. That’s the thing no one wants to talk about 2016: the absolute mess Hilary Clinton’s campaign was. Much like Dewey she chose to believe that there was no way anyone would vote for Trump. There were far more signs than with Trump that he would self-destruct – the Access Hollywood tape was the biggest – but Hilary never seemed to care that much not only about winning but down-ballot Democrats. There was also the very real fact that Obama had been President for eight years and there would have been some swing voters who would have swallowed Trump as a nominee to get a Republican in the White House. All of that, well before anything James Comey send in October, should have been clearest sign that a Clinton victory was not going to be easy. But as we all know now that seems to be not just how Clinton and the campaign but millions of Democratic voters.

Right up until Election Night, like everyone else in America, I was expecting Hilary Clinton to win the Presidency. Unlike the rest of America I wasn’t convinced this was the best thing for the country. Clearly she would not have been as horrible a President as Trump but as we all know that’s an incredibly low bar to overcome. At every point in her campaigning she had reminded me more of W then anyone else I’d seen running for President in her behavior. She had never been a good senator, even before Benghazi she’d done nothing distinguished as Secretary of State and there was nothing in her resume to demonstrate she had the ability to inspire the public the way either Obama or her husband had as President. And given how much contempt the GOP had held her in every aspect of her life before she ran for President, anyone who thinks she would have faced anything less than the kind of abuse Obama had during his term is lying to themselves. They would have been determined to get her from day one and  the moment they got a chance they would have been holding hearings about everything in her career. She would almost certainly have faced a vote on impeachment during her term, only she would have received less public sympathy then her husband.

At the end of the day I was convinced Hilary would win because there would be more people who hated the idea of Trump being President then the idea of Hilary be President. And you can argue that’s exactly what happened.

This is the thing everybody forgets about election night 2016. Almost from the start of it, Trump was ahead in the popular vote as well as the electoral college. It was never by much – at one point it may have been a little more than a million votes – but it was clear to everybody. I know that I was physically ill by that as much as Trump’s apparent victory and I didn’t actually stay up late enough to see it.

I also remember I didn’t have the strength to get out of bed the next morning. I probably wouldn’t have but I had an appointment with my therapist scheduled for that day and I needed to talk to her – as I’m sure most Americans did. We discussed the results at length and I expressed my dismay at the country. She’s the one who told me that, in fact, Hilary won the popular vote.

And do you know what my reaction when I heard this? I was relieved. I didn’t start yelling that the system was broken, didn’t say that Trump was a legitimate President, didn’t demand a march. Indeed my reaction was exactly the same involve George W. Bush’s victory in 2000: it was a fluke but we’d get another chance.

I spent much of the next four years in a state of more or less being off-kilter but for all the ghastly aspects of the Trump Presidency I never considered him illegitimate. I thought he was a horrible human being who didn’t deserve to be anywhere near the White House but the fact that Hilary should have been President because she won the popular vote was not one of the things that angered me the same way it seems to have infuriated everybody else, from the mainstream media to late night comics to the Daily Kos. I don’t like that Trump became President any more than all of his haters but I never once considered that the entire Republic should be torn down as a result.

Which is why I now need to reveal the big lie of 2016: the one that has caused so much aggravation and shouting from the moment Trump was declared the winner. It’s not going to be easy but you need to know it because it’s been dividing our country ever since.

Yes Hilary Clinton won the popular vote by about 2.7 million votes out of 128 million cast give or take. And that is because she won California by roughly 4.3 million votes. Had California not be part of the union, Trump would have won the popular vote.

And for those of you are still upset that Bush became President in 2000, Al Gore carried California by 1.3 million votes.

Now there’s a very good reason most Americans don’t know this story and I also know it’s the same reason even knowing it won’t make a difference in the minds of the millions of Americans who have been arguing about the unfairness of the Electoral College. To be fair “the will of the people was subverted” is a more winning argument for a political party to make then “the American people rejected the will of the state of California” which is frankly a more accurate narrative in both the cases of 2016 and 2000.

  I can’t believe that Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Steve Kornacki, Jon Oliver, Seth Meyers etc., didn’t do a deep dive into the vote count of 2016 and not notice where the difference in the popular vote came from in 2016. It’s too big a discrepancy to just miss. And the reason they haven’t stated is not just among other things the arguments of Russia hacking the election and all of the real crimes that were involved. These are things that need to be investigated, and all the crimes that came out of it in the years that followed did need to be investigated and Trump was as corrupt as they say they were.

But two things can be true too at the same time: Russia did no doubt hack the 2016 election and Hilary Clinton was no doubt also a terrible campaigner who was unable to inspire enough people to vote for her. The first doesn’t discount the second, but the fact she ‘won’ the popular vote makes it far easier to absolve Hilary Clinton of all her faults. It has the added advantage of allowing the media and late night -  all of whom hate Trump and with whom the feeling is more than mutual  - to delegitimize his Presidency the same way they refused to acknowledge Bush’s.

But far darker than that is that is also overlooks the most famous statement Hilary made during the fall election when she called Trump’s voters ‘a basket of deplorable’. Four years earlier Mitt Romney had made a similar comment before a closed door session of Republican fundraisers and was caught on tape. His comment was just as horrendous as Hilary’s. But eight years later, there is now a huge part of the population who think the only mistake Hilary made was apologizing for it.

In my lifetime and well before there’s always been a contempt about anyone who would vote for Republican candidates. These statements were made about Nixon and Reagan, and they were certainly made about W. and Trump. There’s a very clear bigotry just in making this statement: “why would any intelligent person vote for Trump?” It’s one thing to dismiss the candidate but there is a sizable part of the population who dismisses the voter as well. They’ve been brainwashed by Fox News, they’re racists, they live in flyover country. They’re not real Americans.

That’s why, much as I’d like to believe the fact that all of this argument about the Electoral college over 2016 is all about the overwhelming landslide in California will change some mind, I truly believe it will just cause its opponents to dig in on their talking points. They are so locked into the narrative of blue states good, red states bad, that the fact that their candidate was in fact lost the popular vote in 49 of 50 states will not change their minds one bit. The Republicans, if the election had been determined by popular vote, and they saw the California results had been the reason: they would have had just as legitimate a grounds to be upset by the results as Democrats were with the electoral college. And I have no doubt no Democrat would have argued about unfairness then. In their minds, the will of the people had been heard because it was the right people. Who cares if flyover country voted for Trump in record numbers? The real states voted for Hilary and that’s all that mattered.

And because of this Hilary Clinton – who was one of the most polarizing figures in America for her entire active life and no doubt would have continued to divide the nation as President – becomes the best candidate in the mind of some people, particularly on the left: a failed one. Better, she was cheated out of the office. That they would have no doubt started ragging on her the same way they did to Obama and would do to Biden four years later if she’d been President is forgotten along with all of her flaws in her life and on the campaign trail. She didn’t lose the 2016 election any more than Al Gore lost in 2000: an antiquated system fueled by Republican corruption defeated her. She is now a defeated candidate which is the minds of millions is always better than an elected one.

That’s it for my experience with Presidential elections. For the rest of these articles I’m going to deal with the Senate, something that has been around for 250 years but that a lot of people only seem to have realized how important it is in 2017.

 

 

 

 

 

Gary Hart's Electoral Failures, Part 3: 1987 -How Gary Hart’s Character Flaws Ended His Hopes for The White House And His Life in Politics

 

 iT might be stretching a point to call Gary Hart a leftist in the sense that it was understood in either the 1970s or now; what is clear having looked at his political career even prior to everything that occurred leading up to the events of April 1987 was that his behavior and attitude had so  many of the benchmarks of what I have come to note of leftists across the political spectrum historically.

Perhaps most significant was framing himself as having ‘beaten the establishment twice’ prior to 1987. Going against the establishment is the trademark of the left (as well as Populists in general) as well as how he defined victory. His first ‘victory’ in 1972 was measured that he helped McGovern win the Democratic nomination from the people who ran in – and then in the fall campaign lost to Nixon in the biggest electoral landslide in history. His second was a campaign against the establishment nominee Walter Mondale that ended with him coming up short. In the first case, his campaign set the Democratic Party back for nearly a generation, and in the second he neither got on the ticket nor did he do anything substantial to the platform. Neither had done anything to help the Democratic Party win the Presidency. All they were was moral victories which is the kind the left specializes in and may actually prefer to actual ones.

More significantly they were victories for Gary Hart. The former had gotten him well known enough that he won a Senate seat in 1974; the latter had raised him to the status of frontrunner for the nomination in 1988. That it had come at the expense of 49 state landslide rejection of the Democratic Party might actually have suited him because it meant that he could frame the party in his own image and receive no questions.

Hart also shares many traits with unsuccessful Democratic Presidential candidates and many Congressional Democrats in my lifetime of voter. He was incredibly intelligent, a great organizer of campaigns and incredibly convinced of his own righteousness to the point that he didn’t believe he had to engage in politics in any terms other than his own. Considering that these flaws had led to the disaster of the 1972 Democratic Convention and the unfolding of the final days of the 1984 primaries you would think that he would have learned from those mistakes or at the very least the mistakes of so many of the candidates who were failing. But going into the weeks before he was scheduled to make his announcements there is no sign that he had learned from them – and crucially considered them insignificant.

By the beginning of 1987 Hart was starting  to get the reputation among reporters as something of a flake. And to be fair some of the reasons that they thought so were trivial. One was why he had felt it necessary to change his name from Hartpence to Hart when he entered public life. The other was why he felt compelled to lie about his age: he was born in 1936 but claimed to be born in 1937. There was also a very really unwillingness to talk about anything personal including how he grew up.

None of these things on their own or even collectively were a big deal. What was a big deal was Hart’s decision that since he considered them irrelevant, they were no one else’s business, not the press and not the voters. One can argue about the press’s position on this but when it comes to the voters this is the kind of high-mindedness that can leading to coming off as arrogant and aloof without your political opponents making hay out of it. In the era of Lee Atwater and so many of his ilk, it was definitely going to be a problem down the line. Democrats have lost the Presidency in my lifetime because of their stubborn refusal to not engage when it comes to attacks on their character, saying time and again they’re not worth dignifying by responding too. Taking the high road may be noble but considering the rest of the world probably doesn’t share your scruples, it can be suicide for a person running for high office.

There’s an argument Hart’s best step forward would have been to call a press conference, address all of these trivial issues, answer as many question about it and that very well might have ended it. His refusal to do so shows an arrogance that was going to get him into trouble. But while these issues were trivial, there was that absolutely wasn’t –  his marriage.

Gary Hart had always had a reputation as a womanizer even though he was married and had two children. By 1984 he had separated from his wife twice and when the two appeared in public together they seemed distant and distracted. Hart was not close to his children, because he was focused too much on his career. At one point he and Lee had begun divorce proceedings before reconciling. Hart would later admit he was going through a mid-life crisis but during the 1984 campaign and the leadup to the 1988 one he refused to acknowledge it to the media.

One of the major argument about the implosion of Hart’s political career was that the media, after spending the entire twentieth century ignoring the personal lives of political figures, chose to overcorrect after Watergate and turn every story, no matter how minor into the next big scandal. This may very well be true regarding the minor details of Hart’s life and it certainly played out after he left the race: Joe Biden who was running for the Presidency for the first time was accused of plagiarizing lines from a speech from British MP Neil Kinnock and ended up with drawing from the race before the primaries even began.

However when it comes to the personal life of politicians and in particularly the Presidency, there is a much stronger argument that journalists had been derelict in their duty to the point of negligence when they chose not to indulge in President’s extramarital behavior. It might have seemed like a minor detail when FDR was having affairs or Eisenhower was possibly involved in infidelity with his driver Kay Summersby but it’s still something that should have been discussed. When JFK was having affairs with the mistress of a mobster, it absolutely should have been a major story: this is the kind of thing that could compromise (and definitely influenced) much of Kennedy’s administration. And on other personal matters such as health – I’m think of JFK’s struggles with Addison’s and the fact that everyone in DC knew that FDR was not going to survive if he was elected in 1944 – the media completely failed.

And if nothing else Hart should have been aware by the time he announced for the Presidency in 1984 that the old rules didn’t apply any more. When Ted Kennedy attempted to challenge Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980 he had infamously been interviewed by Roger Mudd. Mudd had been a friend to the Kennedy’s in previous campaigns – he was the last TV reporter to interview Robert Kennedy before he was assassinated – but when he interviewed his brother he was anything but friendly. Not only did he make Chappaquiddick the center of his piece but he mentioned what the state of Kennedy’s marriage was, a question he was unable to answer coherently. If the rules didn’t apply to the last son of Camelot, then they certainly weren’t going to apply to Gary Hart.

And yet his attitude when he began his candidacy in April of 1987 was to not only argue they were irrelevant they bordered on hypocritical. When he was asked by Lois Romano of the Washington Post to respond to the rumors that were already spreading about his being a womanizer he brazenly told them those candidates “were not going to win that way, because you don’t get to the top by tearing someone down.” This is, for the record, exactly how the Kennedys, LBJ and Nixon had in fact become President – and in the last case Hart should have known that better than anyone. So the best case scenario was that he was being ridiculously naïve and at the worse, purely arrogant.

By May the Miami Herald was aware that Hart was having an affair and they started to follow Donna Rice. They found Hart with Rice and confronted him. Hart told them: “I’m not involved in any relationship,” then added that he was set up.

Not long after the New York Times published an article where Hart responding to his womanizing by saying words that have gone down in history: “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anyone wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’ll be very bored.” Even if he’d been innocent, this was all but a dare to the media to do so. And even if they hadn’t someone on the Republican side almost certainly would have. That Hart honestly thought he could say something like this and not get a response is the dictionary definition of hubris.

The Herald published that article on the same day the Times piece came out. Hart then did what was a positively Nixonian response and in addition to denying the scandal condemned the Herald for intrusive reporting. Hart later said that he wasn’t challenging the press with a taunt but was frustrated. He claimed that it was only intended to invite the media to observe his public behavior and not intend the reporters to skulk in the shadows.

This leaves out two critical facts. The first is that this comment didn’t influence the Herald to pursue the story. The second and more important one was that Hart had no business trying to define what the media could and should cover. Someone who is running for President should be held to a much higher standard than the average American because they are seeking the highest office in the land. It was not the place of Gary Hart to tell the media what they should cover and he had no right to tell them what was news. Furthermore it holds the very people he is asking for his vote in a similar contempt when it says it is not their business to decide what they should know about the candidate or what to care about. The idea that the voters were not interested in the topic as the media was not his determination to make.

It is true that there were polls that were published where a majority of Democrats believed Hart had been truthful and that they thought it was unfair. And if that was true then Hart should have had confidence in the voters that they would hear him out. But a week later, he suspended his campaign and in a defiant press conference said the following:

“If someone’s able to throw up a smokescreen and keep it up there long enough you can’t get your message across. You can’t get raise the money to finance a campaign, there’s too much static…I refuse to submit my family and friends and innocent people and myself to further rumors and gossip. It’s simply an intolerant situation.”

This was compared at the time to Richard Nixon’s conference after losing the 1962 California gubernatorial election where he claimed: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” In fact Hart received a letter from Nixon praising him. That alone should have told Hart how wrongheaded he was. When the man who did everything possible to destroy the candidate who ran against him in the eyes of the world and who two years later was forced to resign from office in disgrace tells you that you are on the right side of the argument, that should have been a cause for self-reflection. And yet Hart never seemed to realize the parallel. He still hasn’t nearly forty years later and that fact should really be one his defenders should take away from this.

And just so we’re clear: Hart’s approach was exactly the same as Nixon’s. That December he returned to the race declaring on the steps of New Hampshire “Let the people decide!” He claimed the other candidates didn’t represent his new ideas he got back into the race. And for awhile it seemed to work. Initially he rose to the top of the polls nationally. In January of 1988 he would polled as high as 28 percent and was well in the lead throughout the month.

But in the New Hampshire primary he fared poorly, barely getting five percent of the vote finishing dead last. It was not so much the issues of Monkey Business that sunk him as stories about the debts of his 1984 campaign that became one. He stayed in the race until Super Tuesday but when he got less than five percent of the vote and didn’t carry a single state, he ended his campaign a second time and with it his life in electoral politics.

Hart stayed active in politics even considering running in 2004 for the Democratic nomination. He began a speaking tour and started his own blog, but eventually chose not to run and endorsed John Kerry. If Kerry had won, he was considered for a top cabinet post in his cabinet. He has emerged as a consultant on National Security and continues to speak on a wide range of issues, including the environment and homeland security. In 2014 he was named U.S. Special Envoy for Northern Ireland, the second former Senator to hold that post.

Perhaps his greatest foresight came when he gave a speech on September 4, 2001 before the international law form, warning that within the next 25 years a terrorist attack would lead to mass deaths. Two days later he met with the National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to urge: “You must move quickly on homeland security. An attack is going to happen.”

Yet  he refuses to talk about what happened involving Donna Rice even 25 years later in a book written about it (later turned into the movie The Front Runner) Matt Bai an author who was favorable to Hart and what he represented, could not get Hart to even talk about the event that triggered the end of his hopes for the Presidency. Perhaps we shouldn’t be shocked. Many politicians – particularly those who work on the campaign Hart was a part of – can’t acknowledge their own responsibility when it comes to their actions.

In the conclusion of this series, I will discuss Gary Hart’s real electoral legacy – which is not what he has argued it is for nearly forty years.

Overrated Series: The Newsroom

 

 

The Newsroom doesn’t fit this category as easily as some of the other shows I’ve mentioned because when it was on the air, not even the most generous critic would have considered it a great show. On the contrary from the start the reviews were disappointed at best and openly hostile at worst. The series was never nominated for Best Drama by the Emmys and though it did win some awards no one ever considered them deserved. It was only on the air three seasons, the last one abbreviated, but unlike so many other shows in recent years that have truncated runs (Reservation Dogs is the most recent example) no one mourned its loss or even noticed that much. And no one would seriously consider it among the best shows HBO put out during the 2010s; if anything it’s very close to the bottom of the successful shows that debuted during the decade.

But at the time there were a lot of people who thought of it highly and still do. As of this writing it ranks 171 among imdb.com’s top rating shows of all time which is ludicrously high, above among other The Good Wife and Homeland. Leaving aside that both shows were on the air far longer and therefore had weaker seasons this is insane considering that The Newsroom not only was never as good as either of these shows in their worst seasons. It certainly wasn’t as inventive or imaginative as those series and certainly by the standards of HBO series, it ranks as the most traditional shows it’s probably ever put it out.

Perhaps part of this is something to do with the aura of Aaron Sorkin. I’ll confess that’s why I, in one of my bigger blunders as a critic, gave it above average reviews the first year was on the air. To compound the error I actually watched the second season in his original runs – while the final season of Breaking Bad was airing almost simultaneously. I watched the season finale of The Newsroom the same night Ozymandias was airing for the first time. If I’d had any credentials as a critic I would have been drummed out just for that mistake. (In fairness, I was watching the show with my mother and she didn’t watch Breaking Bad until years later. That’s also, for the record, why I missed many of the early episodes of Mad Men because I was watching Desperate Housewives with her.)

It doesn’t change the fact that I was under the spell of Aaron Sorkin and was willing to defend him to the death even when I knew better. It was clear to me by the end of the fourth episode of Season 1 that this wasn’t the Sorkin who’d written The West Wing or The Social Network or even Sports Night. I watched all three seasons of the show almost in defiance but by the time the third one was airing I had cut my losses and was watching the fourth season of Homeland first and The Newsroom was much lower on my priorities.

I suspect events of the last decade, both political and in the world of cable news, might have led to a halo effect over The Newsroom to the same extent that our current political system has led us to rediscover The West Wing. There’s a critical difference, however; The West Wing was a masterpiece partly because it took place in a fictional world with a fictional White House. Aaron Sorkin never attempted to name actual elected officials that Bartlett and his staff to deal with and he never had actually news reporters used. (When John Wells took over the show, he relaxed that standard when it came to the reporters.) Indeed The West Wing was least successful when it tries to bring in the modern world, particularly in regard to events after 9/11. By contrast Newsroom made it very clear that it took place in today’s society with all of the broadcasts that Will MacAvoy was covering and the staff at ONN were dealing with, often giving days of major media events starting with the Pilot. Sorkin has always been a lifelong Democrat but he managed to be even handed when he was writing The West Wing and most of the political films he’s done after it. By contrast there’s absolutely no subtlety or nuance during The Newsroom from the first minute to the end of it and Sorkin (who wrote every episode) doesn’t have any of the gift for banter or the delicate touch he had with everything else he’s written. It’s like during the three years he was writing the show Aaron Sorkin forgot how to write and only remembered when he wrote Steve Jobs who he was.

But that isn’t the real problem with The Newsroom, and to understand why this is by far the worst thing Sorkin has ever written for film or TV (I can’t speak for his plays) we have to go a little deeper as to what the basic problems are.

I don’t think HBO would have greenlit The Newsroom at any other time but the early 2010s. At that point, it was at the end of the first wave of great dramas that had made the vanguard of the revolution and they were struggling to come up with replacements. This led to them being more experimental with the kind of dramas they greenlit and many of them were very interesting even if they weren’t all successful. I’ve mentioned before that I was a fan of In Treatment when it debuted in 2008 and I was a bigger fan of Big Love which I thought was flawed but frequently was as great as any of the earlier shows in HBO’s big three. Boardwalk Empire’s first two seasons were absolute masterpieces and while the behind-the-scenes behavior of Michael Pitt caused it to lose what momentum it had afterwards, it remained one of the more fascinating (and historically accurate) shows of the period. I’m also a huge fan of Treme and I believe it’s reputation suffered because anything David Simon did would have looked inferior next to The Wire. However during this period, the only audience hit HBO had was True Blood and while this was going on AMC had basically stolen the thunder of being the major source of Peak TV with Mad Men and Breaking Bad and networks like Showtime and FX were regular producing the kinds of dramas and comedies that were the sole property of HBO for the first decade of the 21^st century.

I suspect that HBO sought out Aaron Sorkin sometime in 2011. After Studio 60 had ended in disaster for both Sorkin and NBC, he had written his first screenplay in over twelve years. Charlie Wilson’s War had been highly acclaimed when it debuted (I will get to it in my Sorkin movies section later) and he had followed that with The Social Network and Moneyball. Sorkin had become the first writer to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay in consecutive years since Woody Allen in 1994 and 1995 (Bullets over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite). Seeking him out was a no-brainer for HBO.

The problem was that Sorkin was going to be an odd fit for the network famous for bringing us Deadwood and The Sopranos no matter what he wrote. All of the dramas that HBO produced to that point (and to an extent almost all that followed over the next decade) were known for their darkness of their subject matter, the relentless cynicism and the antiheroes that were at their center. In that sense Sorkin fit as well into that dynamic as David E. Kelley was at the time who in a world where network dramas were following cable, was still producing legal procedurals that were just variations on The Practice. Perhaps the network heads at HBO thought that they would be getting a show with something who had the antihero genes of Mark Zuckerberg or Billy Beane. Instead, they got a drama that, for all intents and purposes, could have just easily fit on a broadcast network – circa 1988.

I’m not saying that The Newsroom doesn’t have an air of cynicism about it, but from the moment we meet Will MacAvoy and he delivers a monologue about how America isn’t the greatest country in the world – and then follows it up with a model of how good it could be again – we know that we’re not going to the next Tony Soprano or even Bill Hendrickson. Wiil is essentially the kind of prototype that’s almost fundamentally that of a Sorkin character; a man who has gotten jaded with his job and his success and rediscovered his love of it. In fact this is basically the exact model we get for Peter Krause’s character in Sports Night in the Pilot – a husband who is finalizing his divorce, is worried about his son, and has become jaded with the world of sports coverage. The difference is, among other things, Sports Night was a comedy more than anything else and it never took itself or its idealism that seriously. Even if it did almost all of the other characters are always grounded in reality, waiting to puncture that balloon.

 The Newsroom by contrast exists where everybody in the show exists in the world of this kind of idealism when it comes to their profession and while you can believe that could exist when you covering sports, it would have harder to do so in the world of cable news even had the show debuted on network television five years earlier. There’s a relentless optimism that dogs the show no matter how horrible things are going either for them or the network that would be tonally off-putting on any network in 2012, and certainly on a show whose first season aired after True Blood.

I realize coming from the man who has frequently complained about even the best prestige shows being too bleak this may seem hypocritical and I like idealism in my characters. But there’s idealism and tempered idealism and we almost never see the latter throughout the first season and much of the next two. And honestly idealism in comedies is nice; idealism about broadcast journalism, particularly in regard to cable news, well, these characters live in a world more fantastic then Westeros if they truly think that’s how the world works.

Those of you who think The West Wing is just a machine for Sorkin’s liberal propaganda would have a much better argument for The Newsroom. I don’t know when the phrase ‘reality has a liberal bias’s was coined but it’s clear that Sorkin is using it as a mission statement for every episode of the show. And he is not subtle about it at all. It’s clear Sorkin believes in educating the viewer as much as he does with all of his films and TV but he clearly forgot the core principle: don’t make it seem like you’re lecturing them. The contrast between this and The West Wing is impossible not to make. Whenever Bartlet talk to his staff or Josh told Donna about political history, it was done with self-awareness and kindness to it that never made it sound unpleasant. There’s also the fact that the staff would also groan and mock everything they were hearing, which meant they didn’t take it seriously.

But Sorkin apparently decided the fact that he was writing with a news anchor as his lead gave him permission to essentially fulfill his fantasy of putting words in people’s mouths during news events. And therefore every time Will delivers one of his broadcast, he sounds very much like a pontificating asshole. In this sense there’s no real difference between him and the Tucker Carlsons or Rachel Maddow’s of the world but I’m relatively sure their off-camera persona isn’t exactly like their on-cameras ones when it comes to talking to everyone else. I never got that sense with Will, who always talks as if he’s the smartest person in the room and never misses a chance to put someone down, even if he’s wrong.

It’s as if every major flaw in Sorkin’s writing is on display in The Newsroom. The biggest one is his problem is his sudden inability to write strong female characters. CJ Cregg is one of Sorkin’s greatest creations as is Donna Moss and so many of the minor female characters in their orbit. And what makes them all brilliant is that they are smart, independent and fully capable. Their interested in being professional first and romantic second. We also saw version of this play out superbly on Sports Night with Dana Whitaker and Natalie who were more than the sum of their love interests.

But perhaps having writing two films where there were no major female leads caused Sorkin to forget how to write independent women. (He recovered from that with Steve Jobs and  by the time of Molly’s Game, he was back in form.) Here he has three of the most brilliant actresses at his disposal: Emily Mortimer, Olivia Munn and Alison Pill. All of them are skilled at both comedy and drama, as I saw before in films and TV shows. And under Sorkin’s tutelage, they are completely useless.

Mackenzie McHale (and why did Sorkin think this was clever?) was involved with Will until she cheated on him and has now returned as his producer. Mac never gets played as anything outside of Will’s shadow in the first season, is frequently stumbling over elemental things and is so mad at herself that another writer might consider her slut-shaming herself. Sloane (Munn) is a brilliant economist who took a job that paid less to work at a media network; we rarely see her intelligence and far too frequently see her used as a buffoon. (Munn later complained that she was used for sexual purposes more than she had been told.) And poor Alison Pill. She was so good in the underrated The Book of Daniel and she was incredible in Milk. She’d done exceptional work in the second season of In Treatment and The Pillars of the Earth and in Snowpiercer she played  the kind of kindergarten teacher we all think we should get.

And Maggie Jordan may absolutely be the worst character Sorkin ever created. She seems to only exist to be the center of a love triangle between Don Keefer and Jim Harper from the start of Season 1 and she spends the entire series denying it. She may be a competent professional and we do see signs of it, but every episode she’s doing everything she can to deny her attraction to Jim and loyalty to Don. She spends the entire series in denial of her feelings, Sorkin basically creates the crisis of Season 2 entirely based on the fallout of everything going wrong with their major encounter at the end of Season 1. Maggie Jordan might as well be called either ‘plot device’ or ‘romantic obstacle’ for all the originality she gets to display in two seasons.

All of which, of course, reminds us how absolutely horrendous Sorkin is when it comes to romance. While he never got to make it pay off in Sports Night he never handled it very well for any of his characters at the Bartlet White House during the four seasons he was the showrunner. (The Donna-Josh romance only played out after he left the series in 2003.) That was fine; it wasn’t what The West Wing was about and it certainly wasn’t what we watched the show for in the first place.

But on The Newsroom Sorkin’s usual deftness is replaced with romantic machinations that would be heavy-handed in a 1980s rom-com. Every time he tries to refer to the Will-Mac relationship in any form, it’s delivered with subtlety of the brick going through a plate-glass window. We don’t believe a moment of Don and Maggie’s romance when it’s happening or when it’s not working; we don’t believe Jim could be attracted to Maggie; we don’t believe that Don is attracted to Sloan. And for a man who has characters who can articulate anything under the sun, the fact that not one of them can talk about their feelings to anybody on the show really makes you question why Sorkin put it there in the first place.

 He was capable of doing it with Sports Night: he made the dance between Sabrina Lloyd and Joshua Malina wonderful; the ups and downs of their relationship adorable and their breakup heartbreaking when it happened in Season 2. Here he’s in a virtual identical setting with so many similar characters in the same positions and it’s as if he’s suffering from a serious head injury as if he’s forgotten his past work.

But that’s to be expected in a series where everybody speaks as if they are delivering portentous news as if they’re on camera themselves. It’s not enough that Sorkin is telling us what’s happened on camera; he has to have everybody in the room explain it to the viewer as if they’re uninformed. This is a series where I genuinely feel Sorkin is writing leftist fanfiction; everyone talks as if they’re Michael Moore talking to the audience and not people who are actually educated on the subject.

And this is by far the most clear with the character who is the engine for this Charlie Skinner. I love Sam Waterston; I really do but this is the most unrealistic character he’s ever played. He doesn’t sound for a moment like a man whose been covering the news for forty years; he sounds like as if he is the character he plays in Grace & Frankie. Only the secret he’s been hiding for forty years is that he’s actually a Weatherman and his cover has been for forty years to play a member of the Georgetown Elite. That so many scenes involve him clashing with Leona Lansing, played by Jane Fonda, makes me wonder if at one point the two of them decided: “Next time let’s do something less serious and Sam asked for Martin Sheen’s number from Sorkin.

Because every filters from Charlie who makes the decision that he’s going to use his cable news network to do something brilliant and that’s deliver news. He sets up Will and Mac to work together, the two of them start moving away from human interest stories and punditry towards the kind of journalism that honestly has never existed at any time in our history but that Sorkin clearly believes should. He is smart enough to cover his bias by pointing out that Will is a registered Republican, which is clearly a plot device on Sorkin’s part to make it clear how far he thinks Republicans have strayed from the path. Cue lines such as this: “I’m a registered Republican. I just sound liberal because I believe hurricanes are caused by high barometric pressure and not by gay marriage.” That’s actually one of the better lines a character delivers in the show, so that alone tells you how little Sorkin cares for nuance.

And make no mistake: The Newsroom is an indictment of everything the Republican Party stands for. In the third episode Will points out the rise of the Tea Party for the sole purpose of the show to study it and realize that the GOP controlled by the Kock brothers. There are stories about Citizens United, delivered as if we were being lectured to by Jon Stewart but with no jokes,  gets to lecture an African-American gay man represented Rick Santorum until he falls apart on camera and ends the final season with a story where he gets to call the Tea Party ‘the American Taliban’ on live TV. I honestly wonder if the people who love this show so much are some of the progressive writers I’ve met on line and are doing a different kind of review-bombing: this is the kind of doom-porn they’d actually watch.

To be fair to the show (and I’m really contorting myself to do so) Sorkin seems to have realized he’s overreached after the first season and spends the next two dealing with more serialized stories that deal with the problems of the news industry. But he never forgets that the Republicans are the enemy, as in an episode where Will talks after laughter at a Republican primary debate where the audience cheers the Iraq War and Will tells that he hopes ‘the audience is in Hell.” That’s there’s almost coverage of Obama during this period or anything involving the Democrats problems during the three years the show covers is no doubt intentional: as far as Sorkin’s concerned this is what fair and balanced should be.

That’s bad enough but what’s worse is that The Newsroom takes place in this mythical theoretical world where so many leftists seem to live. Every decision that is made by Will and the team takes place in a purely moral world where such constructs as politics and economics are irrelevant to doing the right thing.

And the worst part is, it shouldn’t be. In the third episode Leona and Charlie have a long conversation about how what Will is doing is dangerous not because of any political construct but because it will hurt the company’s bottom line. Charlie regroups and tries to talk to her. Leona stops him. “Your entire network makes up less than five percent of my business’s revenue. So stop pretending this is a meeting between equals!”

This is as close to Sorkin admit the reality of the bottom line in regards to how news business works in Season 1, and almost the entire series. And the thing is Sorkin’s other work this is the kind of thing that is his sweet spot. Jed Bartlet was a Nobel Prize winning economist before he ran for public office; before Sports Night ended the major storyline was about whether the title show would be canceled for financial reasons as part of a corporate takeover and economics were as much a character in Moneyball as Brad Pitt. But in the world of The Newsroom, it’s not even a factor for the head of the news division to consider in regards to reporting. His job – everybody at the show, actually – is based on the ratings that Will gets in his time slot. The moment Will starts to telling actual news rather than the fluff that made up cable news, the show gets mentioned by journalism for ethics but the ratings start to drop.

Yet somehow The Newsroom is the only television show in the history of TV where the actual viewership is irrelevant to the content. Late in the first season the network lowers itself to broadcasting the kind of tabloid stories like Casey Anthony and Anthony Weiner’s downfall (the season takes place in 2011) and everyone at the network moans about having to lower themselves to this standard. Of course the ratings to go up but what does that matter if the public isn’t being informed? The only reason they’re doing this, I should add, is so that they can get a Republican primary debate. Not the average debate, of course, but one where candidates would have to actual be challenged on their answers rather than let their streams of BS go unchallenged. (Again Republicans must be held to the standard that Democrats are not.) Of course when a rehearsal of this is played out to members of the GOP, they immediately reject the idea. But everyone’s secretly fine with that because now they get back to doing ‘real journalism’. All of this, I should add, fits the model of what many would consider a leftist news network to be.

All of this to be clear is pure fantasy, not the least of which is the fact that Will and everyone who works for him genuinely believe that they are making a difference in the world. Most of his staff is made up of very young people, and I can’t help but draw parallels to so many of the Gen Z people we see today (some of whom write for this column) who genuinely believe that nothing matters but whether their version of events gets told. ‘Bubbles’ was not part of the vernacular in 2012 the way it is today but in a sense everybody on the show lives in one where they are sure in the righteousness of what they do and do not have to worry about reality. There’s no evidence that any of this makes a difference to the outside world, and the ratings always range close to third or fourth throughout the show’s run. But this is fitting with the leftist instincts of Sorkin as well: that it doesn’t matter how many people see or listen to what you’re doing as long as you are convinced of your own righteousness. All that matters is they’re doing something that they believe is for the greater good. Whether it actually is for the greater good doesn’t matter because they never leave their bubble.

The Newsroom’s final episode ends with nothing fundamentally different from the pilot. Yes Charlie Skinner is dead, the network is under a completely different ownership and the battles that they will have to wage will supposedly be harder from this point on. (The show aired its final episode in 2014, which is a relief in a sense: trying to tell this story in the era of Trump would have been a delusion Sorkin could not have maintained.) But nothing’s different from the pilot. Indeed, the show flashes back to the first episode where Charlie is giving Will the message before everything supposedly changed. The network’s going to keep the same standard of journalism its been doing for the last three years and that’s all that matters to Sorkin. That they haven’t made a real impact on society doesn’t matter, all that matters is that they keep up their quixotic quest.

The Newsroom no doubt made the right kind of people very happy – leftists, journalists and the kind of Sorkin fans who truly believe Studio 60 was a masterpiece. (As someone who watched every episode, they clearly haven’t seen it.) For anyone else, particularly a lover of Peak TV and everything it can be, it demonstrates the worst aspects of all things that television could represent. HBO has never tried a drama like this since and while I really don’t like a lot of their darker shows (my readers know what I think of Game of Thrones and Euphoria ) The Newsroom is a prime example of why Sorkin’s brand of idealistic television doesn’t fit in on cable. David E. Kelley has learned to adapt he’s now capable of literary adaptations of every variety. But Sorkin hasn’t tried to come back to TV since and, at the very least, I hope he brings his brand of television to broadcast if he does. There is a place for the kind of idealism he writes about in The West Wing but it only works when Bartlet’s your President and not Obama.

What Numbers and History Have Taught Me About Elections, Part 3: At Least Primaries Are Democratic Or The Myth That Conventions Used to Be Fun

Throughout all the years I’ve been observing politics and particularly in the lead-up to this election where nobody seemed to be look forward to a Biden-Trump rematch,  there has always been a huge amount of ragging on the Presidential primary system.

This has been going on practically since Jimmy Carter managed to win the Presidency since he did something no Presidential candidate had ever done before: compete in every primary and win the nomination. Carter’s decision to compete in all thirty Presidential primaries was successful because on every day he won at least one primary and managed to get closer to the nomination every day. Even at the time journalists like Jules Witcover bemoaned this strategy, perhaps because out of self-interest. This meant that every candidate was going to take a similar strategy and their lives would be much harder from that point on.

I have heard some variation on this complaint from the moment I started paying attention to politics in 2000 from at least one major media outlet several times in the course of the cycle. I can practically recite the complaints verbatim: campaigns take an eternity now and never end; too much attention is paid to smaller, non-diverse states at the start; by the time bigger states get to weigh in, most of the ‘good’ candidates are gone; it’s too long, protracted and expensive, the nomination is determined by a minority of the voters, and of course the candidates we get are inadequate to the task.

Except for the last part which I repudiated in my last column, I’m actually in agreement or sympathetic to many of the claims that are made. And I agree that this is the worst possible way to choose the nominee of a major party…except for all the others. And as someone who has studied political history extensively, I know of what I speak.

The idea of the brokered convention is mentioned at least once every election cycle, usually to drum up suspense by reporters who genuinely want to draw in viewers when they know the inevitability of the outcome. And I can understand the appeal of it. Conventions are basically stage managed affairs for the cameras, all done to coronate a candidate and for all intents and purposes they’re ceremonial. The problem is all of this basically a myth that has been idealized by historians and academics that gives the idea of mystery when in truth they were almost always as stage managed then as they are today – there were just no cameras to cover it.

There was a huge amount of discussion all through the spring and summer of 2024 that both conventions should go against what the primary voters had done and vote to remove both Biden and Trump as nominees for the good of America. There was always something basically dictatorial about this idea – that, to paraphrase Clemenceau, democracy was too important to be left to the voters – and it went against what conventions had done in the past and in fact could do. There was even more discussion about this leading up and after the debates and despite my basic problems with both men, I always believed to go through with it would be a cure far worse than the disease. The fact that the Democrats did so with Kamala Harris doesn’t make my basic argument any less pertinent; indeed, should Harris end up winning the Presidency (as seems very likely at the time of this writing) it makes the issue more relevant. So given that, let’s discuss what conventions were prior to the Presidential primary and for all intents and purposes I’m going to use my starting date for that as 1972, which is when McGovern became the first candidate to make the primaries more essential to the nomination then before

First let’s discuss the delegates. Delegates, summarized briefly, are the representatives of a single state at any convention, Democratic or Republican. For whatever reason Republican conventions have historical had fewer delegates represent each state then at Democratic ones. At the 1968 Republican Convention, for example, Texas had 56 delegates represent them; at the Democratic convention, Texas was represented by 104. Ever since 1936 in order for a President to receive the nomination of their party, they must receive a majority of the total delegates. In 1968 Richard Nixon needed to receive 667 delegates to get the Republican nomination for President; Hubert Humphrey needed 1312.

Between 1840, when political parties began having conventions and 1968, after which a committee led by George McGovern enacted reforms, delegations were headed, traditionally, by the heads of the state parties for each political party. The Nebraska Republican Party would send one slate of delegates (as they were called) to its convention; the Nebraska Democratic Party would send another to that one. The head of these delegations were traditionally the leaders in each state, usually an elected official who was prominent in that state. Perhaps the most famous head of a delegation in the twentieth century was Richard Daley, the long-time Democratic mayor of Chicago who controlled the Illinois delegation for decades.

That’s the key word: controlled. In theory, every delegate for a state had the right to vote for whichever candidate he pleased. (I’m using the masculine term deliberately as you’ll see.) Theoretically any one of the 112 members of the Illinois delegation and the 1968 Democratic Convention was free to vote for say Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern. But in practice, delegates were completely at the mercy of Daley’s whim and didn’t say boo unless if he gave permission. Daley had told them to vote for Hubert Humphrey and unless you wanted to survive in Illinois politics you did what Daley told you to do.

Daley may have been the last of the big city bosses by 1968 but he was just following what was the tradition of both major political parties ever since conventions had started. Every state delegation had a head, someone who told you who you were going to vote for on the first ballot, the second ballot and so forth. If you were a member of the New York Republican Party from the 1870s to the 1880s, you did what Roscoe Conkling told you to do. Conkling was the senator from New York, and one of the most famously corrupt politicians in the Gilded Age. If you wanted to have a career in New York politics you went to see Conkling, and he would give you power. In exchange you surrendered your free will to him and that was true at every Republican convention during that period. You voted how Conkling decided, and his decision were based on the highest bidder.

This term I should be clear was literal at most conventions. How much actual money changed hands after a certain point I can’t say for sure but after civil service reform was enacted in the 1880s, both parties got subtler at it. The bosses in both parties did still have power but they were more indirect. In exchange for the Pennsylvania delegation in 1892, you would get appointments in the next administration if you backed the winning candidate. If your candidate lost the election, well, the bosses didn’t forget and four years later they remembered you as a ‘good soldier’

None of this, of course, actually effected the delegates who were voting: most of them held political office in some form (Congressional, statehouse, alderman) and they were more than familiar with horse trading. One or two might get promoting down the line, maybe they’d end up remembered for higher office down the road. But the idea that the delegates in either party had any real role in choosing the candidate for the 19^th century and well into the 20^th was completely fictional: they did what their bosses told you.

And to be clear, the bosses had no intention of initially letting things like primaries get in their way. In 1912 when Theodore Roosevelt decided to run for the Republican nomination, he ran in twelve states that had Presidential primaries. He beat Taft in nine of the ten states the two competed in, including Taft’s state of Ohio. But the convention was controlled by Republicans who were loyal to Taft. TR won 278 delegates in those primaries but at the convention, Elihu Root the chairman of the convention elected Taft delegates in those states. Most of the members of the GOP were old colleagues of Roosevelt; Root had once said he was TR’s dearest friend. But they considered what TR was doing tantamount to treason and they had no intention of letting him be their standard bearer, even if it cost them the White House in November. This was either a betrayal of the people or a profile in courage, depending on how you look at it. (I believe it was the former; these days people might consider it the latter.)

After that, primaries essentially became beauty contests that had nothing to do with who actually got the nomination for basically the next forty years. In 1932 FDR was nominated primarily because he managed to persuade the big city bosses that he would help them gain more power   In 1936, as David McCullough quotes in Truman, at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, all of the big bosses were gathered.

“Edward J. Flynn of the Bronx, Frank Hague of Jersey City, Mayor Edward Kelly of Chicago, Boss Ed Crump of Memphis and T.J Pendergast of St. Louis…At one time or other, Roosevelt had courted and worked with them all, and he would again. He called them all his friends. And all appreciated what wonders the Roosevelt magic had worked for them in four years. As Marquis Childs observed: ‘The vast expenditures of the New Deal had put into their hands power they had hitherto scarcely dreamed of.”

That is how FDR was ‘chosen’ at a brokered convention. FDR managed to get the more socialistic aspects of his New Deal through Congress not just because of the crisis but because he also knew how the system worked. He knew these men were all corrupt – Pendergast would never attend another convention and be indicted by the time FDR ran for a third term -  but he also knew this was how the world worked and he was not about to change it. The New Deal was giving Democrats majorities they hadn’t had in the lifetime of most men, and now they had more power and influence. It was a mutually beneficial relationship.

You will hear stories throughout history books of demonstrations in the galleries, loud cheering, and spontaneous outpourings. What they frequently leave out is how few of these demonstrations were spontaneous and not planned. The bosses didn’t like surprises at their conventions, and they were fine with the galleries cheering and roaring – as long as they got to pick the nominee. Most of the stories of multiple ballots are true but the delegates rarely got to have much effect on it. The dealings were being made behind the scenes usually in hotel rooms by the heads of the delegations with the managers of the candidates. With few exceptions – the Democrats fracture in 1860 and the Republicans in 1912 – conventions did everything they could to keep the fighting behind closed doors and not on the floors.

This was a lot harder with the Democrats. The South in 1840 had formed a rule that no nominee could be picked without two-thirds of the total delegates agreeing. The South did this to have veto power over any candidate; first to ensure slavery, then to make sure Jim Crow was the standard in the South. As you might imagine this often led to Democratic conventions taking longer than Republican ones. In 1912 Champ Clark got a majority of the delegates by the tenth ballot, which almost always led to the leading candidate getting the nomination. But because of the 2/3 rule and opposition from certain parties he didn’t have it, which led to Woodrow Wilson getting it on the 45^th ballot. This carried on throughout the 1920s until after FDR was nominated in 1932 and he got rid of the two-thirds rule – for which many Southern Democrats never forgave him.

And for everyone who told me Wilson and FDR were what you could get with a brokered convention, they were the outliers not just for the Democrats but for both parties. The bosses didn’t want candidates who would upset the order of things; that’s why the Republican bosses wanted Theodore Roosevelt to be McKinley’s running mate in 1900. Even at 41 TR scared the hell out of the old guard and they figured if they made him McKinley’s vice president, his political life would be over – something TR himself thought would happen when McKinley was elected.

Neither party want the social order changed which is why some of the greatest political figures over that century from Daniel Webster to Robert LaFollette to Sam Rayburn were never nominated for President or even serious candidates. This system gave us just historic Presidents as Franklin Pierce, Benjamin Harrison and Warren Harding. And those were the winners in this system. Below is a picture of Alton Parker, the Democratic nominee for President in 1904

 

 

Except…I tricked you. It’s actually James W. Cox, the Democratic nominee for President in 1920….Nope I was lying again. Or was I? Well, even if you were the greatest American history buff imaginable, you wouldn’t know because you’ve never heard of them even though they were picked by conventions.

And in case you hadn’t figure it out already, the people who picked these nominees were all rich, white men. In their minds there was a certain kind of person who could be president and only him. WASP probably wasn’t invented yet but that was what all nominees were. It took until 1928 for a Catholic to be nominated for President and there was just furor when Al Smith earned the Democratic nomination that millions were afraid that if he was elected the Pope would run the White House.

And to be clear, whatever roles women and African-Americans had at any convention up until the 1960s, it was almost entirely ceremonial no matter which party. It took a long time for either party to start going so far as to let women address the conventions in a serious role. I think the first significant one was when Claire Boothe Luce, a Republican Congresswoman addressed the 1948 Convention and called Truman ‘a gone goose’. I’m not sure the GOP would have been willing to go that far even if she was an elected official if it were not for the fact, she was also married to Henry Luce, one of the most prominent publishers of the era.

And neither party really wanted to talk about ‘the Negro problem’ as it was called for most of the twentieth century for fear of isolating the South. It wasn’t until Hubert Humphrey spoke out in favor of it at the 1948 Democratic convention that they became part of the conversation, and as he did so the South did walk out of the convention. (I’ve written about this in a couple of articles before.)

That’s all of the argument about platforms, that thing writers admonish Republicans for not having. Well even when they were prominent for both parties neither wanted to change that much. Republicans hated the New Deal but Americans loved it, so for the next thirty years Republican nominees for President from Landon to Nixon, all said the New Deal was great but if you elect us we’ll do it better. Even civil rights wasn’t really much of a difference between both parties until 1964 when Goldwater, who had voted against the Civil Rights Act, made sure it was a non-starter so he could woo the South. That’s not to say the Democrats covered themselves with glory that year: when the Mississippi Freedom Party had Fannie Lou Hamer about to testify before the credentials committee on national TV, LBJ basically stopped in its tracks because he didn’t want the South to walk out of his convention. One was right and one was wrong, but neither wanted black faces on the screen.

That is what these conventions were for a hundred and thirty years: where the decisions of who got to lead our nation, what was part of the discourse and who got to run for President was decided by the political elite, through corruption, bullying and arm-twisting, and exclusive run by white men in both parties. How could anybody with a straight face argue that our primary system, messy, expensive and broken as it is, is anything but an improvement? For all intents and purposes, our political leaders were essentially managed by oligarchies and mediocrity wasn’t just the norm at the end of it, it was what both parties wanted.

And these primaries are more democratic in a far more important way. There is no way that Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American to run for President in 1972, could have even had a hope of being nominated for anything at any convention if the primaries didn’t exist. The futile campaigns of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton for Democrats and Alan Keyes and Ben Carson for the Republicans, wouldn’t have been a possibility during convention era, and the idea of an African-American becoming the nominee of either party, much less winning, would have given nightmares to the bosses of both parties in 1956.

Nor would Elizabeth Dole, Carly Fiorina or Nikki Haley have been able to run for the Republican nomination, or Hilary Clinton finally win the Democratic nomination in 2016. It wasn’t until 1972 that a woman’s name was even put into nomination at a major party (Sissy Farenthold, the Democratic convention.)  The bosses might have wanted to win women votes but they would have never considered letting Geraldine Ferraro or Sarah Palin run on either ticket in 1964. And the idea of Kamala Harris even being allowed to run for President, much less have a chance of winning the office…you really think that could have happened under that system?

The old cliché in our country for the last two hundred years was anyone could become President. We all knew it was a lie, and it was a ‘white man only club’ for most of our nation’s history. It’s still mostly a lie, I grant you, and we can discuss the idea of privilege all you want. But at least you can tell your daughter as well as your sons they have a chance and not be dismissed as easily as you would have been even twenty years ago. I’m not saying that the Obamas and Hilary Clintons or Harrises of the world are perfect; I’ll be the first to say they’re not, and if you want to dismiss them in the same breath as the Nikki Haleys or Tim Scotts of the world, fine, you’re entitled too. But this dream would have out of hope to all of them, no matter which party they voted for, half a century ago under the old system. How is this not a sign of the promise of American democracy that we’re having the kinds of discussions about these candidates Presidential prospects that our parents would have just dismissed because of their race or gender?

That’s the real reason I can advocate for some kind of backward momentum on primaries regardless of what happens in this year’s election. I agree with everything people say about the campaign season and what primaries have turned into. But the idea that at the end of the primary season the delegates could, if they didn’t like the nominee, change their mind and nominate someone else – someone who didn’t get a single vote from the people – that’s a step backwards for democracy no matter how high you say the stakes are.

Look I get that no one was enthusiastic about this year’s matchup before Biden dropped out. I’d be more upset about that if I hadn’t heard the exact same argument made in 2016. And 2012. And 2004. And 2000. And 1996…

Yes I know Trump is a threat to all we hold dear, and democracy is a broken system, blah, blah, blah. (I’ll have more to say about that when I deal with 2016.) I share your frustrations and fears and I’m open to reasonable solutions. But the idea that in order to save democracy we have to destroy it at least partially – which is what the media was talking about for both candidates and that they actually did in the case of our sitting President -  then I truly wonder we’ve lost as part of our democracy. And I question the commitment to those same values of all those who’ve spent the last year arguing that it needs protecting.

 Our commitment to our principles as a nation are importantly especially when it seems in the greatest amount of peril. A nation cannot pick and choose what laws it wants to obey any more than the average person can. We don’t govern based on opinion polls and breaking the law isn’t any less illegal if the majority of people don’t agree with it. Over and over I hear the phrase: “Your institutions will not save you.” That is as much fear-mongering as anything that I’ve heard from a Republican in the last ten years. It just strikes terror into a different set of people. I’ll be told to look back and say these fears are genuine and those of Republicans are baseless. Does that make what you’re saying any less conducive to rational discourse?

Kamala Harris has made her unofficial campaign slogan: “We can’t go back.” And I’d argued that applies to our wretched Presidential primary system as well. I’m more than willing to advocate for reform and reconstruction but elimination – that something I refuse to return too, no matter how things turn out in November.

In the next article in this series I will finally get to 2016. Spoiler alert: New Yorkers will appreciate this article more than most.