Voting in the Electronic Age

...and the rise of militancy among minorities and women dealt a further blow to the old patterns Party reform must be examined in the context of these broader trends, manifested today in the findings of public opinion polls, the increasing tendency toward non-af-filiation and split-ticket voting, and the general drop in both voter registration and turnout The modern media revolution has profoundly altered electioneering and diluted party influence, too Polsby makes frequent references to the phenomenon, and includes a brief, splendid section on the new "political professionals"pollsters, direct mail experts, media advisers Unfortunately, he never accords this breed its proper weight in the transformation he seeks to explain In the past, a party acted as the mediator between the voter and the candidate who carried its banner Now the electorate can see the nominee on television, during the nightly news and-given adequate financing-in paid commercials The pollster has replaced party canvassers as public pulse taker, the advisers design literature that the direct mail specialists send to computer-calculated "prime voters", and telephone banks run by paid operators on election day have made old-fashioned "pullers" virtually obsolete Not much is left for ordinary party members to do Direct access to the public has also meant that the party is no longer the unavoidable first step on the way to a career in public life Formerly, the ambitious would aspire to office after a period of serving the organization, often in lowly stations At present, newcomers launch campaigns with nothing save their party registration as evidence of loyalty, and it is often felt that close involvement with day-to-day party business is the mark of a hack Initially, reformers rejoiced at these developments, for the regular establishments seemed to be the first casualties But it turned out that media politics knew no factional boundaries Just as surely as it undermined the traditional party approach, it withered the committed voluntarism that is the essence of reform movements Both sides, in sum, have been deprived of their historical roles A final effect of electronic politics has been the escalation of costs, making money more powerful than ever before The media is insatiable In 1960 about 10 per cent ot a Presidential campaign budget was spent on advertising, in 1980 over 80 per cent David Garth, one of the most successful practitioners of the new campaign strategy, summed up the situation when he said that using funds for any purpose other than buying commercials was "a waste of time and money " Because Polsby focuses on party reform at the expense of elements that are playing a more vital role in changing America's politics, his book offers a very limited analysis of the trends that have shaped our present polity In addition, it leaves the impression that a return to stronger parties and more traditional practices would produce better candidates, more effective Presidents and greater stability in public life It will take a good deal more than amending party rules to do that...

...Voting in the Electronic Age Consequences of Party Reform By Nelson W Polsby Oxford 267 pp $24 95 Reviewed by Richard C. Wade Distinguished Professor of History, Graduate Center, City University of New York One day in mid-June 1968, I sat down at breakfast with the Chicago Sun Times To my astonishment, I read that the Illinois state Democratic "convention" had "elected" me as a delegate to the party's upcoming national gathering I had never requested, much less run for this post, actually, in the wake of Robert F Kennedy's assassination, I retained no more than a modest interest m who would become the Democrats' Presidential nominee If I had not seen th?notice in the paper, I would never have known of my new eminence either No one informed me of it personally, I received no embossed announcement, or, until I appeared at the convention hall, credentials I suppose 1 should nonetheless have been flattered, but I was appalled The next Democratic ticket and platform were about to be concocted under a system that operated fully independently of the preferences, views and knowledge of most party members I subsequently discovered that my election had been relatively decent At least it transpired in broad daylight, and 1 was, after all, a lifelong Democrat as well as modestly active in public affairs The late venerable Senator Hugh Scott (R -Pa ) once observed that a Republican slate from a Southern state was decided upon by GOP National Committee members in the back seat of a cat on a country road Indeed, until '68 the delegate selection procedures in both parties were shot through with favoritism, fraud, inordinate susceptibility to the power of money, and contempt for the meanest standards of fair play To begin with, the national committeemen and women in each state were automatically designated as delegates, though most of them were picked four years before the convention when few could predict the potential candidates or the major issues Methods for filling out the lists varied Many states named all their delegates a year prior to the convention Others made their choices at meetings held in county chairmen's kitchens Only a handful of the most fraudulent cases were ever challenged, and those usually thanks to the remonstrance of an unsuccessful candidate rather than outraged public opinion I recite these few details from a long corrupt history simply as a reminder that the reforms of the past decade and a half did not result from conspiracies by extremists of the Democratic left or the Republican right Even the beneficiaries of the old ways recognized that extensive change was necessary to maintain popular confidence in the nominating process and to stem the national decline in party affiliation and loyalty Thus the 1968 Democratic Convention instructed the party's National Committee to establish a commission to draw up new rules and guidelines on delegate selection in time for the 1972 campaign This proved a more revolutionary act than its authors had calculated, because powers were conferred on the National Committee that had previously been decentralized Shortly it would be charged that the commission chaired initially by South Dakota's Senator George McGovern and then by liberal Representative Donald Fraser of Minnesota-was a plot to favor a particular candidate oi clique Yet objective analysis of the commission's performance belies the accusation Most regular party leaders joined disat tected reformers in backing the effort National Chairman Lawrence O'Brien appointed the panel, the National Committee endorsed Us report, and advice and suggestions were solicited from party members in hearings held all across the country The panel set about its task by first tracing the development of the structures its plan was to supersede The staff compiled a "state book, describing the delegate selection practices in every state and territory To assure accuracy, local party officials were given an opportunity-which most of them took-to comment upon and clear the respective sections When this verification was complete, the full volume provided a factual basis for the eventual recommendations The commission members realized that since such a national code for a major party was unprecedented, they were operating in a fog bank They also knew they were not exempt from history's iron law that "things never turn out the way you expect," and took particular care to have every one of their proposals fully debated Ultimately, although a few items were passed by a narrow majority, and some would become contentious, the vote on the final report was nearly unanimous In any case, there could be no doubt that the purpose of the whole undertaking was to strengthen the party, not to diminish it Now, in Consequences of Party Reform, Nelson W Polsby attempts to assess the impact of the changes made by both major parties over the last 15 years He is unhappy with what he finds In his view, valuable traditional procedures-albeit often contradictory or quaint-have been undone without anything superior replacing them Today, Polsby argues, elites have excessive influence on nominations, candidates are less prepared to lead the country, and an endless accumulation of public and private interest groups can demand veto power over specific policy areas in return tor their support, so entangling a President bv the time he is elected that effective national government is almost impossible Not that Polsby is a romantic "Nostalgia," he writes, "will not do as a foundation tor [new] public policy He appreciates that advances have been made toward equality and social decency, but holds that old-style parties are worth reviving because "no better institutions have evolved to conduct nominating politics " More vaguely, he maintains that "the tasks parties still perform are both essential to harmomize with the Presidential nominations process and are crucial for the proper general functioning of the political system ' The book is relatively brief, given the importance of the subj ect It is based on extensive research and careful scholarship, however, and is written with sufficient clarity to render its argument intelligible to serious readers as well as highly useful to campaign strategists looking to 1984 Polsby's weakness is that he feels much more comfortable with the recent work of political scientists, pollsters and journalists than with historical background material or the testimony of political practitioners This, combined with his seeing 1968 as the origin of our present problems rather than the culmination of previous long-prevailing currents, results in a study that sails irregularly for lack of historical ballast Preoccupation with the contemporary prompts the author to zero in on two topics as essentially illustrative of '' party reform " and it s consequences?the McGovern/Fraser guidelines and the performance of Jimmy Carter's Administration His bias concerning Carter is revealed in the first page of the Introduction, where he asserts that "by the simple criterion of prior experiences in national politics and government no newly elected President in the entire history of the Republic was ever less well prepared to take office than Jimmy Carter, unless it was Ronald Reagan " Polsby apparently is asking us to believe that, for instance, the military service of Zachary Taylor, Ulysses Grant or Dwight Eisenhower was better training for the nation's highest office than Carter's term or Reagan's two terms as a governor In reality, few voters even knew whether Eisenhower was a Democrat or Republican until 1950, or had much idea of where Taylor or Grant stood on the vital issues of their day-slavery and Reconstruction, respectively Yet in a footnote to his extraordinary notion, Polsby finds that only Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson were as poorly prepared for the White House as Carter and Reagan Cleveland had been a mayor and a governor before becoming President, and Wilson a governor of a major industrial state Moreover, historians have always regarded both men's performance in Washington as well above average As for the book's nearly exclusive stress on 1968 in discussing the McGovern/Fraser Commission report (reproduced in an Appendix), it is certainly true that the demand for an overhaul of Democratic Party governance was intensified by the emotional campaign It is true, too, that conditions at the convention in Chicago induced regular leaders to offer rules changes as a consolation to delegates who had been pledged to Kennedy, McGovern or Eugene McCarthy On the other hand, credentials fights of the sort that took place in the Cow Palace had already become common in both parties, starting with the challenges brought against the Mississippi delegation at the 1948 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia And for some time the revolt against entrenched party mechanisms had been gathering support from Democrats at the state level Seen in a historical perspective, in fact, the reform at the end of the' 60s brought to fruition a push for democratization of party affairs that stretched back to the introduction of primaries at the beginning of the century The failure of the Carter Presidency in the late '70s, by contrast, had much less to do with the upheavals of the preceding period than Polsby contends No one will deny that the ex-Georgia governor's nomination would have been impossible before the McGovern/Fraser reforms were adopted Nonetheless, to claim that his ineffectiveness was a direct result of the new system is far-fetched Herbert Hoover's disastrous tenure was never blamed on the workings of the Republican Party in the 1920s Franklin Roosevelt, despite his success, prudently had the Democratic convention's two-thirds rule abolished while being renominated in '36 No historian would attribute the largely impressive record of those who assumed the Oval Office following their predecessor's assassination or natural death to the way they came to the job But Polsby declares that "What it takes to achieve the nomination differs nowadays so sharply from what it takes to govern effectively as to pose a problem that has some generality " The author's almost obsessive concentration on his two pet peeves precludes his delving into the deeper causes of the present crises in American politics The McGovern/Fraser Commission and our 39th President may have accelerated party disintegration, they did not trigger it Patronage, for example, had always been the glue of the party system-whether jobs in the public sector or the emoluments that flowed to private individuals and firms by public decision From the New Deal onward, though, numerous factors contributed to its steady decline in importance Civil Service improvements slowly ate away at the positions that could be filled by local leaders, in the almost uninterrupted prosperity following World War II ever fewer constituents needed political favors to obtain employment, the suburban explosion threw people into environments where national party labels lost much of their appeal, the GI Bill produced a whole new generation of trained college graduates whose parents had never dreamed of higher education, the 26 th Amendment, somewhat later, extended the franchise to young people who were marginally involved in politics and not at all in party affairs...