A QUADRENNIAL FOLLY
Just add smoke!
It happens every four years. No, not the World Cup. Not even the American presidential election, though it’s a related phenomenon. Every four years, about this time, pundits and political junkies alike start speculating about how this is, finally, the year when America will be treated to the phenomenon, last seen in the fifties, of a multiballot political party convention, A/K/A the brokered phenomenon, A/K/A/ the smoke-filled room, though in actuality the three phenomena are nt quite identical.
Personally, I gave up on this particular whimsy some years ago, though it would make for great television, but I only came to realize how fatuous it was four years ago, when commentators began dragging this tired speculation out for the Democratic convention at which there were only two candidates. Since that old-time commonplace the favorite son has also long vanished from the political scene, there just isn’t that much diversity in the monoculture of big, splashy national campaigns crushing, one by one, every other alternative until, at the end, there’s one left standing.
Despite their never ending past the first ballot, let alone stretching out into double- and, occasionally triple-digit numbers of ballots as the spectacles did up until World War II, the conventions were worth watching through the sixties and into the seventies. Nobody quite knew who was going to win the nomination as late as 1976 in at least one party; after that, they quickly deteriorated into big boring infomercials, and getting out the Parcheesi board or watching Paladin became desirable looking entertainment alternatives.
Since most of the moderate alternatives to Bernie Sanders’ radicalism are perceived to have collapsed (Joe Biden) or have no appeal to minorities (Pete Buttigieg) or both (Amy Klobuchar), the punditry have contented themselves with the media-driven late entry campaign of Mike Bloomberg as the Democratic establishment’s last hope of stopping the socialist juggernaut on its way to handing the republic another four years of the miseries of Donald Trump.
The field having been winnowed of most of its most interesting contenders, I’ve not been doing my debate scorecard very religiously. I accidentally on purpose missed the LGBTQI town hall, as I find their musings on affairs of the heart mostly unhelpful and I want to keep my antipathy to the Donald stoked to a hot, hot fire. The December debate got wiped out of my DVR in the tsunami of bowl games, and I didn’t hear anything exactly new in the New Hampshire and Nevada debates, though I did, in their aftermath, puzzle over why the punditry insists on yoking electoral performance to debate performance in the case of Biden and Klobuchar, but not to anybody else. Now, admittedly Elizabeth Warren, Sanders, and Buttigieg are the most consistent and even-keeled debaters up there, and they always do pretty well by traditional metrics, and aside from Warren showing up with varying levels of assertiveness, never really change their talking points, but I don’t see why debate performance matters for two candidates but not the others, though admittedly the exit analysis probably got it about right by pointing out that by comparison with the drowsy Bloomberg, Lunchpail Joe looked like a bright and vigorous colt again.
Of course, all of three states have picked delegates so far, and they are pretty inconsequential states at that in terms of delegate strength, so statements of hope from the candidacies which are peering into the banquet hall at this time are fairly plausible. And after Bloomberg’s limp debate performance in Nevada last week, his supposed momentum of the past few weeks seems to have been blunted.
Underlying all their dithering over all of this, the media has decided to save some focus for the curious phenomenon that polls indicate that a healthy majority of Democrats state that electability is more important to them than issues, but that they keep voting for the supposedly unelectable Sanders. In the first place, it was the media who declared Sanders unelectable; the selfsame polls show that these voters think that Sanders is in fact the most electable candidate. Perhaps there is a little oddity around the edges there, perhaps it’s a mistaken belief, but it’s certainly not the sort of cognitive dissonance writ large that the punditry and the pollsters make it out to be. The common folk simply disagree with conventional media wisdom about who is electable.