Transcript
THOMAS MANN: What I'd like to do is simply raise some questions about the process. We began this conversation with a Brookings briefing on the book The Front-loading Problem a couple of weeks ago. It was before the Iowa caucuses. We talked about this unusual system of the "invisible primary" that's largely an elite activist process the year before the Iowa caucuses, followed by an extraordinarily front-loaded calendar of caucuses and primaries, which has become even more telescoped with the decision by the Democrats to allow events to occur a month earlier than they had before, therefore following hard on the heels of the New Hampshire primary. And then, of course, there is a delegate-selection process, which was put in place initially by the McGovern-Fraser reforms in which most of the delegates are formally selected in primaries and caucuses but in which almost a fifth--so-called super delegates--have the freedom to select as they wish.
Now, we know that process has a lot of shortcomings, and Adam's op-ed this morning certainly articulated a good number of those, and I suspect he will flesh that out for us this morning. It turns out voters, when they get an opportunity, make their decisions on the basis of really very fragile bits of information. There tends to be a rapid narrowing of the field after Iowa. Momentum, either positive or negative, can develop very quickly in a way that tends to overwhelm the other kind of deliberative processes that we would like to think are involved in selecting a party's nominee.
All of that is true, and if I had my druthers, I would alter that process in various ways. But in addition to that, it's worth noting that some positive things have occurred during the course of this process. Number one, we've had long-shot candidates have their day in the sun. We've seen an opportunity for a former governor of a small state to basically set the agenda for a party, as Howard Dean has, and to demonstrate new fund-raising capacities that hadn't been fully exploited by Democrats in the past.
We've seen that the process has allowed a testing of candidates in very different settings in which they have succeeded and failed and succeeded again. But that's a good measure, it seems to me, of a candidate's durability in the general election and even conceivably a test of his abilities in the Oval Office.
We've seen a process in which the Democrats, rather than engaging in internecine warfare, have actually worked to develop a policy consensus for the most part, and in which most of their critical commentary has been focused on the other party and on the incumbent president, not on one another.
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