A nostalgic comment by Stan Raines

Hillary Clinton’s recent comment that her husband’s clinching his first nomination in June of 1992 and of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June, 1968 was peculiar not only because it was in poor taste in the second part, but because no one has noted that, in former times, it was usual for the presidential contenders to become apparent in the summer before the election.

In times past, the normal thing for presidential aspirants to do was announce their candidacy in January or later. For the last several decades, however, the announcement dates and states jockeying to make their primaries more significant have caused primaries to creep up the calendar until, this year, no less than eight states held primaries or caucuses in January. 

New Hampshire, traditionally the first primary, held its primaries on the second Tuesday in March up until 1968. Somebody in the Republican Party that year noticed a correlation between leading in the polls and winning in New Hampshire and an insurmountable momentum that led to an innevitable nomination. This pattern has only been thwarted twice since then, most recently in 2000 when trickster Karl Rove ran one of the dirtiest campaigns possible in the following South Carolina primary to break John McCain’s campaign and boost his man George W. Bush.

In the meantime, the creep began. New Hampshire’s 1972 election moved to the first Tuesday of March and its been moving forward ever since. The invention of Super Tuesday in the Eighties added momentum to the movement.

Right along with that movement, candidancy announcements have also moved forward until, in the present election cycle, some potential candidates began floating rumors of their availability and willingness the day after Bush’s swearing in.

The questions are, are we a better country,  and do we get better candidates with this extended primary system?

Undoubtedly, the pundit class, the Limbaughs and O’Reillys, and the twenty-four/seven cable news operations are better off for it. They’ve got to have something to expend all that hot air over. Unfortunately, they keep themselves riveted on side issues such as the Wright affair or over Hillary’s latest gaffe (such as the one with which we began this piece) and not much on actual issues and positions that candidates have taken on issues and what the likely outcomes of those positions might be for the country (aside from spouting Party talking points). They also spend interminable time watching polls and what they have come to lovingly call “the horse race.” And are we a better country for all this bubble-headed attention?

Likely not.

Worse, the expansion of the presidential election cycle to four years leaves no breathing space for citizens to catch their breath, calm down again, and actually consider what’s going on in their lives and around them without pressure from the parties and the punditry to cast everything in the black and white tones of partisanship.

Political parties, much like the military, are at best a necessary evil. As to the military,  remember that one of the items on the complaint list in the Declaration of Independence was the forced billeting of troops. Well, they’re not in our spare bedrooms, but nonetheless, we are forced to billet a tremendous number of military personnel and their equipage, too. The only good reason to form or support a political party is similar to the only good reason to maintain a military: they did it and we better, too. Otherwise, both are unnecessary overhead, as our good forefathers and mothers recognized. We, on the other hand, have elevated both military and political parties to an absurdly high level of praise and worship.

Political parties, their rhetoric aside, are by their very nature anti-democratic. As a flustered John Bolton put it to John Stewart on The Daily Show a few months ago (and I’m only mildly misquoting him), the purpose of electing a president is to put into place the program of his backers, his masters. And for the losers? Well, screw them. They don’t understand much anyway, and besides, they are losers and therefore deserve nothing.

How untrue. The purpose of democratic action is to find the will of the majority and to protect the rights of the minority. Always. In other words to find a way to do what the majority wants that the minority can live with, too. An important assumption is that everyone is voting their conscience based on the best evidence on a proposition or candidate they can have. All their questions must be answered, the true meaning of “due diligence,” a much ignored phrase and concept these days, having been replaced by the simpler idea of vetting, which seems to be the art of uncovering dirty laundry and closeted skeletons.

We’re going to be a better country if we roll back this perpetual primary and its perpetual appeal to partisianship and distrust. Put the run for president back in its season—candidate announcement in January and forward, primaries in March and April and June, and conventions in August.

And give us some peace in the meantime.