Here is a thought for both parties as they head toward 2024: beware that large, diverse crowd of talented newcomers. It will do you no good. This has been tried two times before and has led to disaster.
In 2016, it was just such a field that gave us Donald Trump and his win that November. Democrats did it again in 2020 and walked right up to the edge of disaster. They ended up rushing to embrace one old white man in order to avoid nominating another.
Republicans’ embrace of Trump led to their current dilemma — they can’t win with him, and they can’t win without him. This may strangle their chances in future elections. As for the Democrats, they had nearly handed the keys to a septuagenarian socialist when Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina plucked Joe Biden from the ash heap of his own Iowa campaign and thus saved the day. Former President George W. Bush was right when he told Clyburn at Biden’s inaugural that he had saved the whole country.
Then again, a field that’s too small has its own set of problems, such as those of the Democrats in the 2016 cycle. Hillary Clinton ran without real opposition, only to become precisely the type of candidate, talentless, uncharismatic, and untrustworthy, capable of losing to Trump in the fall. A character case could have been made against Trump, but she had no standing to make it. She and her husband were forced to sit stone-faced and silent as he was sworn in to the office they wished was her own.
Clinton and her friends thought of her as Trump’s polar opposite, but a great many others saw them as far too similar. Trump and Bill Clinton were too much alike in terms of lust and predation; Trump and Hillary Clinton were too close in terms of greed; the three of them were all alike in terms of mendacity.
As a result, Biden of Delaware, in spite of being the son of a car dealer and not a coal miner (as he once seemed to imply in a set of commercials), was able to pass run and win on the basis of his seeming like a sane human being — an off-ramp to normal.
Both parties should now come to their senses and make changes to counter the results of the last time they made changes. In 1968, the murder of Robert F. Kennedy led to Hubert H. Humphrey being imposed as the nominee, riots outside the Democratic convention, and the presidency of Richard Nixon. But the McGovern Commission’s reforms in response to that disaster were rather too sweeping, leading to the erasure of adult supervision in the primaries. Let’s give the party bosses a larger role in picking the nominees.
We don’t need a reprise of Richard J. Daley or the police officers he unleashed in the streets of Chicago, but the mobs that attacked and ransacked the Capitol on Trump’s direction are at least as bad. If you happen to think this sounds undemocratic, let us recall that Trump was, in fact, a minority president who never came close to winning 50%.
If party bosses are what it takes, then let’s strike while the iron is hot. It might happen again, and Clyburn might not be around when it does.
