Take On the Talking Heads
The Primary System Is Broke -- Fix It
by Garry Wills
Who profits from this? The early states, where millions of dollars are squandered quickly. Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Michigan will fight tooth and nail to keep this cash cow, but their profit is our loss. The heavy year-long preparation for these early contests is one reason the campaign finance system puts candidates in hock to the special interests. George Bush has already squandered $50 million of his hard-begged money on these early races -- and that does not count all the ancillary spending by the groups that supported him, openly or surreptitiously, on ads or phone calls or leafleting. This pushes candidates ever deeper into the pockets of their owners.
And that is another defect of the system. These odd corners are small enough to make feasible the vicious kind of phoning and push-polling that poisons the early races. Lauders of the system like to say that it is good to have "retail politics" in these states, where the people meet the candidates for hands-on persuading. But the same conditions make for the anonymous phone calls that are not so much retail campaigning as stealth smearing.
The results produced by these primaries are freaky, giving wins or strong showings to people who have no chance to win in the general election -- in the past, to Jesse Jackson (in Michigan), Pat Buchanan (in New Hampshire), Pat Robertson (in Iowa). Only the fact that the first caucuses are in a state with a high religious vote lures people who do not belong in the race at all, like Pat Robertson or Gary Bauer.
The positions of the real candidates get distorted in the process. Candidates are forced to extremes to win nominations that turn worthless outside the fun house of the month. George Bush began this race with the hope and promise of de-kooking the Republican Party, cooling its religious ardor; but the early primary season drove him back into the embrace of Pat Robertson.
Only in the fun-house atmosphere of these oddball states could millions of dollars, hundreds of hours of air time and acres of print be spilled on ideological gotcha games in which Bush ludicrously claims that McCain (the pro-life, pro-gun candidate who voted for Clinton's impeachment and against Martin Luther King's holiday) is a liberal, or in which Bradley tries to claim that Al Gore (the pro-choice, anti-gun supporter of the Clinton programs) is a conservative. Such ideological dances are only performable in the rarefied air of nutty primaries.
McCain is no liberal; the right paints him as one only because, for a while, liberals can support him for their own purposes, as they just did in Michigan. Bradley can paint Gore as a conservative only by archaeological digging deep into the past of a man who started as the representative of a small conservative state and freed himself from its integument. These exercises have nothing to do with the handling of pressing issues in our time.
And now we have the absurdity of a Republican primary in which the losing candidate gets a majority of the Republican votes while the winner gets a majority of the votes from people who call themselves liberal, who favor abortion on demand, who favor campaign finance reform -- positions that have a snowball's chance in hell with Republicans in Congress or at a national Republican convention.
There is no question anymore that the system is broke. The only question is how can we fix it? There is nothing sacrosanct about this arrangement. It grew up largely by accident, and comparatively recently in our history. We should be its masters, not its victims.
Copyright © 2000 Universal Press Syndicate
