Maybe it’s a good
thing a lot more people watched the Yankees-Red Sox
melodrama on TV last week than the Democratic
presidential debate sponsored
by CNN. Thanks to the miracle of videotape, I
managed to see both. Staged in
Arizona, the latest production of “Nine Candidates
in Search of an Audience”
showcased less the candidates’ merits than their
party’s traditional inability to
discipline itself even with the most crucial
presidential election in a generation
approaching.
Then over the weekend,
I heard a Republican savant on the radio vending
the preposterous theory that Wesley Clark had
entered the race as a “stalking
horse” for Hillary Clinton. Invoking the Hillary
Monster has become the GOP’s
surest means of extracting cash from Moron-Americans
who haven’t already
flung it away on RV excursions to Branson, Missouri
or yielded to the pleas of
faith-healing televangelists. The Democrat party,
the fellow claimed, is being run
entirely by Bill and Hillary Clinton.
If so, here’s
my advice to Chappaqua, N.Y.‘s fun couple: ditch four or five
of these jokers at once. Nine candidates isn’t
a political contest, it’s a litter. With
all nine standing behind podiums in a semi-circle,
the CNN exercise resembled
less a debate than a game show, with emcee Judy
Woodruff preening, posing,
interrupting, scolding, and generally acting
as if she--as the representative of
Washington’s celebrity press corps--were the
star, and the candidates hapless
contestants to be discarded in favor of next
week’s nobodies. On one or two
occasions, Woodruff actually turned her back
and walked away from a
candidate giving an answer that evidently displeased
her.
Maybe the experience
was good for Clark, who as a four-star general can’t
have been patronized to his face very often.
But the effect was to render the entire
field rather foolish. Already diminished by the
necessity of pretending what everybody
knows to be false, i.e. that all nine candidates
are equally deserving of being taken
seriously in the context of a presidential race,
the actual contenders risk resembling
people who take handmade signs emblazoned with
network call letters to the ballpark
hoping to appear on TV. Watching Woodruff parade
back and forth, I half expected
to see Howard Dean or John Kerry whip out cell
phones and begin waving maniacally
to some pal in a bar who couldn’t get tickets.
More seriously,
what Bill Clinton and anybody else who qualifies as a Democratic
senior statesman needs to do is persuade the
following four candidates to drop the ego
trip for the sake of the party: Dennis Kucinich,
Carol Mosely-Braun, Al Sharpton and
John Edwards. Doing so publicly might become
necessary. None has any chance
whatsoever to become the nominee. Their participation
only distracts attention from
the candidates who do, and contributes to the
air of solemn fakery that made last week’s
CNN extravaganza both tedious and faintly embarrassing.
They should endorse somebody
soon and go away. Say what you will about the
Republicans: it’s hard to fault their TV
production values. You’ll never see a nine candidate
GOP debate.
Now me, I’d also
tell Joe Lieberman to take a hike. But only a sound drubbing at
the polls seems apt to get his attention. Meanwhile,
the very real danger the party appears
to be sleepwalking into is that with almost all
the Democratic primary contests concentrated
into a period of fewer than six weeks between
late January and early March 2004, the strong
possibility exists of a deadlocked convention--the
very problem the early primaries were set up
to avoid. Facing a well-financed and politically
ruthless Republican machine, the Democrats
hoped to give their candidate an early running
start.
Besides the foreshortened
primary schedule, making less efficient the normal winnowing
process as candidates like Lieberman and Edwards
are forced to face political reality, two
additional factors make gridlock likely: an October
10 Gallup poll showing Clark narrowly
leading with the support of 21 percent of registered
Democrats, Dean with 16 percent, Kerry
and Lieberman with 13 percent each, and Gephardt
with 8 percent. The results are skewed
regionally, with the three New Englanders drawing
little support in the South. (Clark leads in
all regions.) Secondly, convention delegates
are selected proportionally in all fifty states to
candidates winning more than 15 percent of the
votes.
If the primaries
took place simultaneously tomorrow, in short, the likelihood of any
candidate securing a majority of the 4318 delegate
votes needed to secure the presidential
nomination would be small. (Of the total, 798
are “super delegates” appointed by party elders;
giving Bill Clinton, interestingly, a bigger
role than the average ex-president.) Fixated upon their
ritualized starring roles in New Hampshire and
Iowa, Washington media savants haven’t
grasped how rule changes may have changed the
game. But come the July convention,
the nation could be in for one hell of a TV show.