Hi William B. Kohn; On smoke filled rooms and re: "This is going to be a real test for the Republicans. Can they effectively lead in a more mainstream style than they did in '94?"
This is exactly correct.
I see the Democrats as the party of the lazy (government workers and welfare recipients) and criminal (various law breakers), so I would love to see the Republicans take over completely for a decade or two.
There is a strong feeling in the population that divided government is a good thing, and that if the Republicans or Democrats are in complete control they will move too far to their extremes. This is what the Republicans have to avoid. Now can we do this?
My guess is that we can't.
The problem is that the Republicans (and even worse the Democrats) are, as parties, run too democratically. That is, the parties are no longer run by a few intelligent individuals who make decisions designed to keep the party in power (by keeping the party's platform as mainstream as possible).
The Democrats were able to keep political power for decades by the technique of making decisions in "smoke filled rooms". FDR wasn't an extremist President (as compared to average US public opinion at the time). Even LBJ, with his great society and all that, was within the bounds of what the public wanted. As many long time Democrats who turned Republican in the 80s and 90s have said, the current Democratic party is not the same one that gave us Truman.
Both the parties (maybe since after reforms caused by the Chicago 1968 riots) have had a worse and worse problem with being run by their fringe elements.
I believe that this is what has brought our nation to the point where the public sees divided government as the only solution, and frankly, unless we get rid of popularly run parties, I think we're going to remain exactly where we are. That is, I expect that the Republicans will go overboard and put the Democrats back in power (or a divided government) in 2004.
I'm not a party hack, and I don't know what the laws governing political parties are. I'd love to see the Republican party return to its "smoke filled room" days; I think we could rule this country for decades, but I have a suspicion that in addition to being unrealistic, such a change would also be illegal. I just don't know how election laws have changed.
Let me reiterate what we do now with a numeric example. Suppose that there are 10 people with opinions equally spaced in the range of 0 to 9 (i.e. the population is {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}). The natural solution would be for 4 to run against 5 in the general election. Instead, our brilliant solution is to divide the population into two equal groups (i.e. {0,1,2,3,4} = the "First Party" and {5,6,7,8,9} = the "Bigger Party"), and then let each group choose its candidate in a primary.
Naturally, the First Party chooses 2, and the Bigger Party chooses 7. So the voters are forced to choose between extremes.
If one of the political parties would go back to smoke filled rooms, it would choose candidates based on their attraction to the whole population instead of their attraction to just the Democratic or Republican party. That's the only way we can get to put 4 or 5 on the ballot. And if only one party reformed itself this way, it would put itself into very long term control of the government.
Of the two parties, I think the Democrats are too obsessed with "fairness" to choose candidates any way other than by letting the left wingers vote on them. But the Republicans, being more traditional, might be willing to go back to the old ways of choosing candidates (I wish). Unfortunately, being realistic, I don't think it's going to happen.
-- Carl |
