Toward a National Primary
WADE, RICHARD C.
Toward a National Primary Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics By Byron E. Shafer Russell Sage Foundation. 628 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by...
...And once the new guidelines were decided upon, compliance came more easily than anyone expected even in states with the worst practices...
...By the 1960s the route to the convention ran through New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oregon, California and New York...
...The most obvious recent alterations involve the return of elected and party officials to the business of delegate selection...
...The congressional group is now selected before the first caucus or primary, and a state may designate up to a quarter of its delegation outside the caucuses or primaries...
...These changes represent a retreat from the spirit of the earlier requirements...
...The California stand for the latter position was illustrative and the most dramatic, since the delegate stakes were so high and the memory of the RFK assassination was fresh...
...Shafer connects the two consequences by a meticulous examination of the commission staff, which represented the "new politics," and those appointed to the body itself by the Democratic National Committee, who to some degree represented the regular party organization...
...With the reforms new states entered the sweepstakes...
...But the author's contention is sustained by careful and exhaustive research, by a patiently constructed narrative of hundreds of small events and minor dramas, and by a shrewd analysis of the agendas—sometimes clear yet often hidden—of the participants...
...In 1952, Eisenhower contested Taft delegates not only in the Credentials Committee but before a national television audience...
...Excluded areas may soon complain that they do not have an adequate voice in picking the nominee and urge the discussion of a more national approach...
...Robert Kennedy adherents generally preferred primaries to caucuses, and winner-take-all systems to proportionality...
...all voters had to have clear information on the time and place of the meeting effecting the choice...
...It underestimates, for example, the Kennedy-McCarthy split on the commission that underlay the differences between Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa and Senator George McGovern of South Dakota...
...In any case, the "front loading" of a large number of state selections in March certainly lessens the 1970 emphasis on a four-month schedule that presumably would afford lesser known and underfunded candidates an opportunity to get a fair hearing in 50 states...
...They have already been challenged as unfair by "long shot" candidates, and as racially discriminatory by the Reverend Jesse Jackson...
...Proportionality has been reduced, too, by establishing a "threshold" of 20 per cent: Where a candidate falls short, his share of the vote is divided among the winners...
...The final brief and legalistic regulations contained enough ambiguities to create several credentials contests in Miami in 1972, leading to numerous refinements and modifications by subsequent commissions mandated by later conventions...
...Still, Shafer's assertion that the party would never be the same again has been borne out over the past dozen years...
...The author also neglects the historical trend toward reform in both parties that antedated the formation of the McGovern Commission in 1968...
...In the light of the extraordinary media coverage of the 1984 election, it seems improbable that such an important "revolution" could have taken place quietly between 1968-72...
...and emphasis was placed on declared Presidential candidates, rather than already elected public and party officials...
...As early as 1948 a mixed delegation from Mississippi challenged the all-white group presented by the regular Democratic Party on the floor of the convention...
...Democrat" was referring to the McGovern Commission reforms that altered the process for choosing the Democratic Presidential nominee...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Wade Distinguished Professor of American History, Graduate Center of the City University of New York Larry O'Brien, the then chairman of the Democratic National Committee, proclaimed the new rules issued in 1970 for selecting delegates to Democratic national conventions as "the greatest goddam change since [the advent of] the two-party system...
...Amendments to the guidelines were nevertheless inevitable...
...The accumulated guidelines have brought the Democratic Party closer each election to a national primary (without, it might be added, any of its advantages and with most of its disadvantages...
...But the subliminal McCarthy-Kennedy split remained...
...In addition, the new system eliminated many entrenched practices, particularly proxies...
...Only Governor Calvin Rampton of Utah suggested this possibility in the commission's deliberations, and it was quickly voted down...
...Mr...
...Indeed, Shafer's description comes very close to suggesting that the young staff attempted a virtual coup against the old order as an inattentive commission only fitfully considered the probable consequences of the outcome...
...Commissioner Fred Dutton was from that state, and the author mistakenly attributes his persistence to residence, not experience...
...and required that the delegates include "minorities," as well as women, in a "reasonable relationship" to their numbers in the general population...
...To be sure, it missed the South, but it comprised a decent mixture of other sections, large and small states, and was reasonably representative of Democratic voters...
...scrapped old state rules...
...Moreover, he added later, "Never has a political party so totally changed its way of doing business in such a short period of time...
...They have produced an "extensive change in the backgrounds, experiences, perceptions, and values of the major actors in Presidential politics," he says, noting that all this was done with little overt public interest and virtually no attention in the press...
...Byron E. Shafer, in his Russell Sage Foundation study of their impact, calls them a "quiet revolution...
...Even though the activists did not get everything they wanted, the changes were sweeping...
...Delegate selection was taken from the hands of traditional party leaders and turned over to enrolled Democrats through primaries or caucuses or carefully circumscribed local conventions...
...If the time has come to discuss a national primary, Byron Shafer's Quiet Revolution provides a convenient and intelligent introduction to the problems and endless complexities of choosing a Presidential party nominee in a democratic way...
...Those with a Kennedy past (or perhaps future) assumed primaries would magnify the influence of minorities and blue collar voters, while those having the McCarthy perspective tilted toward caucuses and the new white collar elite...
...Hence Eugene McCarthy supporters almost universally favored caucuses, and proportional representation over primary elections...
...But the present "front loading" guarantees that over half of the convention delegates will be selected in the first five weeks when all of New England and a large part of the South make their choices...
...Yet the deeper drift since 1972 is toward a more radical system...
...Subsequent Republican and Democratic conventions saw fights over rules and credentials become increasingly frequent, revealing a growing dissatisfaction with the selection process and exposing its vulnerability...
...Its admirable qualities notwithstanding, however, Quiet Revolution has significant problems...
...With small exceptions, all delegates had to be chosen in the Presidential election year...
...Furthermore, "state books" used by the McGovern Commission's staff to examine local regulations produced such overwhelming evidence of widescale fraud, chicanery, floating money, favoritism, and undemocratic procedures that not a single commissioner resisted the need for change...
...In fact, the thesis is simple enough: The McGovern Commission, in revising the way Democrats pick their national convention delegates, transferred power from the old "elite" based on blue collar voters to a new "elite" reflecting the growing influence of white collar activists...
...As participants in the turbulent events of 1968, most members approached their task from their own analysis of what they considered the lessons of the previous year...
...Although some may wince at its detail, serious students will find this book a model of scholarship on a contemporary topic...
Vol. 67 • April 1984 • No. 7
