Don’t worry. I’m not going to say anything about suspending elections.
Instead I’m highlighting a new column from the Weekly Standard‘s Jay Cost, who wonders whether it makes much sense that roughly half of the presidential voting electorate is “totally hung up on whether Rick Perry would make any gaffes in last night’s debate.”
Cost suggests it might be time for a major change in the presidential nomination process. He points to several major problems with the current process.
Say what you want about the old convention-style nomination battles, at the very least they required the participants to reach a consensus. It didn’t matter how long it took, a candidate had to get to half-plus-one of the delegates (and prior to 1936, Democrats had to get to 2/3rds). That meant the eventual nominee was a candidate whom everybody (or almost everybody) could live with, as well as parting gifts for the losers – be it in the form of a favorable plank in the platform or the vice-presidential selection.
This is not the case for the modern system. Democrats regularly win the nomination with less than half of the primary electorate (Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all had less than 50 percent). And, in 2008, John McCain became the first GOP nominee in the modern era to win with less than half the vote; 53 percent of all Republicans preferred somebody other than McCain, yet he won anyway.
This makes no sense. Our “first past the post” system for general elections is intelligible, as somebody has to be seated in the office. But the nominee of the party does not win an office; he simply gets to represent the party in the fall campaign. So, shouldn’t he be representative of the party’s preferences?
