The UN Runs through them: UK & US elections and the SG hustings

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: August 10, 2016 Last modified: August 9, 2016

With the gladiatorial clashes of the Labour leadership election and the circus of the Republican and Democratic elections, the election for the Secretary General of the United Nations, has been overlooked, though it has almost as many candidates as for the Republican nomination, albeit of a generally higher calibre.

In its own way, the UN’s relevance was reflected in the other contests. It was Blair and Bush’s inability to get UN endorsement for the Iraq War that made it an act of illegal aggression, and their failure to bully Hans Blix, the UN’s inspector for Iraqi WMDs, into perjuring himself was what convinced most of the Security Council not to support Blair-Bush bellicosity.

The Labour Party putschists tended to support the war, as did Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, of course, but less so Trump – most of the Republicans tacitly or vociferously supported the war while Trump has on occasion demurred. But then both Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are of the archaic left that sees respect for the UN and international law as bedrock principles for foreign relations rather than occasional expedient excuses.

The UN Secretary General’s race also raised other issues that appeared in both the Democratic and Labour contests. Many wish and hope that a woman will head the UN. I have to confess that my experience of the UK’s first woman prime minister, and the USA’s first female secretary of state at work ensures that I do not confuse a double-X chromosome with feminism or the milk of human kindness. Certainly, in the case of Clinton there was nothing in her personal or political treatment of other women to suggest her professed feminism was anything but a burning ambition for one woman only.

But then I noted that the gang that used to wield women-only shortlists to ensure that locally popular lefties did not become prospective Labour parliamentary candidates were happy to dispense with such formalistic feminism when the opportunity came to run a woman for Labour leader this time.

In the case of the UN Secretary Generalship, two separate modes of bean-counting are involved, the idea that it is Eastern Europe’s turn and that it is time for a woman. Indeed, there are three modes, if you include previous Chinese pledges not to oppose third world
candidates. If there is an insidious cancer in the UN, it is the rotation system that has built up over the years. There are calendars with rotation systems indicating decades in advance which regional group will hold which position and which country within the group will get it. That is, for example, why we have the absurdity, indeed obscenity, of a Saudi membership of the Human Rights Council and its subcommittee choosing special human rights observers and a rabid pro-Settler Israeli ambassador chairing the UN’s legal committee!

In the UN’s idiosyncratic geography, Western Europe includes Israel, New Zealand, Canada and Australia – but not Cyprus, which is in Asia! The Eastern Europe group is a Cold War hangover –  most of its members are, or want to be in the EU and proximity to Moscow means that they have crossed Putin’s people in some way – or, almost as bad for getting Western votes, he might support them!

And then there is the political irrelevance of regional rotation. The Chinese insisted on a Third World candidate to replace Kurt Waldheim and so we had Pérez de Cuéllar from the Latin American and Caribbean group. I would modestly suggest that the Swedish Dag Hammarskjöld was a better representative for developing countries than he ever was.

This year, the President of the General Assembly, an annually rotating office, Danish this year, arranged very transparent hustings, with SG candidates addressing meetings of diplomats, NGOs and media to showcase their qualifications. It is a big step forward for show business, but the actual selection is  still firmly by the Security Council, as if it were the PLP or the DNC that decided the leadership or Presidential candidate selection regardless of the voting among members and supporters.

The first straw poll of the Council members in July was a surprise for some pundits. Antonio Guterres, former Portuguese PM and male, emerged ahead of the field with Danilo Turk, former Slovenian President, a close second. The woman who emerged best in the debates, Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica, came way down the list, perhaps because her big thing has been Climate Change – to which the Council diplomats only pay lip service even if it is perhaps the most crucially relevant aspect of the UN for the future of the world!

To be recursive, we can perhaps applaud that neither Trump nor Clinton are in position to impose their candidate in an election which might determine whether the UN has a future worth talking about.

Primary Colour is green - for money

Letter from America – Ian Williams

Tribune: Ian Williams

Published: June 10, 2016 Last modified: June 7, 2016

Those who advocated primary-style elections in the British Labour Party should learn their lessons from the shambles of the presidential process in the United States, if they had not already done so from the Labour leadership ­election. One of those lessons should be to realise the differences between US and European political systems.

American political parties are not parties in the European sense. They do not have members and little or no structure through which ordinary voters can influence the process.

That is why Donald Trump, until ­recently a Democrat donor, can become the Republican candidate, or why Bernie Sanders, a life-long socialist, is one car crash away from the Democrat nomination. (In case that looks as bad as it should, Hillary Clinton invoked Robert Kennedy’s assassination for staying in the race against Barack Obama when all electoral hope was lost!) American parties are essentially coalitions of candidates trying to seize the spoils of success.

As we approach the end of the grueling primary elections in the US, Hillary Clinton has been declaring victory for months because of the so-called super delegates, who are essentially self-appointed party functionaries who have not put themselves through any significant electoral process but who do know whence the cheques will be coming.

To be fair, much of Bernie Sanders’ success, like that of Jeremy Corbyn, comes from voters who had abandoned the Democratic Party and over the years of Vietnam, followed by the Bill Clinton years.

Like me, they had changed their registration to “Democratic Party” solely in order to vote for him or voted in states that allowed open primaries, where independents could vote in the Democratic primaries.

That highlights a major difference from the British system – in the US, the primary elections for party candidates are run by the government, just as if they were normal elections. Meant to rescue elections from smoke-filled rooms in Tammany Hall, the advent of television advertising in effect restricted primaries to people who either had money, or could raise it.

The Clinton family business was famous for courting Wall Street – for the same reason that bank robber Will Sutton explained his choice of target. “I rob banks because that’s where the money is.” Bill Clinton’s avowed purpose of eroding the influence of what he called “special interest” groups – such as the unions, minorities, pensioners who might oppose austerity measures, deregulation and free trade pacts. Blair like what he saw his chum doing and emulated him.

Money is the root of all evil in politics – and as soon as we had one person, one vote in the British Labour Party, Lord Levy’s money swung the balance for Tony Blair, while John Prescott had to pay off his own campaigning bills later. New Labour designed a procedure to elect the party leader so that influxes of cash from Sainsbury, Zabludowicz, Levy, ­Ecclestone and the like could combine with a rabid media to shoo-in the ­candidate that they wanted.

For both Corbyn and Sanders, new social media has been a gamechanger, upending previous assumptions. Initially, the Democratic Party establishment ­clearly regarded Hillary Clinton as the anointed and decided that saying anything negative about Sanders would just draw unwanted attention to his candidacy. The establishment tactic was to schedule the debates infrequently and at unpopular times which in retrospect proved quite effective.

The more voters saw of Sanders the more they liked him – and seemingly the more they saw of Clinton, the less they liked her but her early victories gave her crucial delegates. If Sanders had had more exposure earlier on, it is likely that he would have a lot more delegates at the Democratic Convention by now.

Polls show that many of his supporters are not instinctively going to vote for Clinton. They support Sanders precisely because of his distance from New ­Democrats and the Clinton family ­business. This is dangerous ground as show by polls indicating that in a race between Trump and Clinton, she is far less assured of success than Sanders. To be fair, Trump’s thuggishly authoritarian attitudes make him a frightening prospect, so we can only hope that Sanders’ ­supporters will hold their noses and vote for Hillary if necessary.

As a less sanguinary wish, many Bernie supporters, even if they discount the chances of assassination that she ­herself has raised, are watching with keen interest the FBI investigation of the former Secretary of State over her ­definitely careless and possibly criminal use of emails. An indictment before the Convention could, of course, mean that all bets are off.

And as a legacy, the Platform Committee that decides the policies Democrats will fight on have a significant and vociferous Sanders contingent, while he is lending support to like-minded candidates for Congress. Win or lose, we have not seen the end of the Sanders’ database.

Primary Discolours!

Primary Follies

Written By: Ian Williams

Published: June 29, 2014 Last modified: June 25, 2014

It is fitting that the Tea Party has a completely fictional symbolism for its ideology. In reality, Sam Adams and the other “patriots” were throwing duty free tea overboard in Boston Harbour to preserve their monopoly of smuggled – and thus more expensive – tea in the New England markets. But the Tea Party’s aversion to paying taxes of any kind, to anyone, does represent a consistent string to the tea bag story.
This month, the Tea Party combined with the American system of primary elections to mount yet another tangential triumph sending all sorts of contradictory messages. The number two Republican in the House of Representatives, Eric Cantor, lost his bid to be the Republican candidate for his Virginia seat. It is measure of the age of unreason that Cantor, a poisonously reactionary shill for moneyed interests, appeared as a moderate when the Tea Party united to defeat the seven-term incumbent. It is almost heartening that he lost despite being backed by lots of campaign funding from the businesses he did so much to serve during his time in Washington.
There are many lessons from this about American politics. Cantor is so far to the right that he would have been almost unelectable 40 years ago, even in Virginia. In those days, the South was virulently racist, but it was quite appreciative of populist government measures that benefited the white poor and middle class. When the Republicans re-conquered the South from the old Dixiecrats, Cantor helped to bring a virulent neo-liberal ideology to the South, and from that base tried with some considerable success to impose it on the rest of the country. It is the combination of Dixie racism and Ronald Reagan’s California neoliberalism that has reshaped the global political landscape.
For ideologues like Cantor, the racist dog whistle was just a convenient tool to persuade poor and middle-class white Southerners to vote for their own economic destruction, and so he made two big mistakes: one was to be relatively rational on immigration reform, and the other was to be too visibly interested in national politics. In the words of former House Speaker Tip O’Neill: “All politics is local” – and Cantor neglected his base, concentrating on his national ambitions, both personal and political. The successful Tea Party candidate emphasised that – and also Cantor’s subservience to the banks. It has to be said that few, if any, successful Tea Party candidates vote against big money when they take office – but they do talk about it.
Little remarked in the American media, the vote also represents a major defeat for the Israel lobby, for which Cantor was a fervent advocate. The lobby often claims success in overthrowing any candidate who had been in the slightest way critical of Israeli policies, but they are keeping understandably quiet about their abject failure to keep Cantor in power, which is a double failure since the lobby’s reputation rests on its ability to marshal funding for or against candidates. In this case, the well-funded Cantor’s loss signals that money is not necessarily everything in an election.
The success of the “insurgent” Tea Party candidate has emboldened many other contenders, so the inner-part conflict within the Republican Party will be accentuated even more, as two sets of reality-challenged reactionaries battle within it for dominance. The reaction of what passes for “moderate” candidates will be to adopt even more hardline positions – in effect, granting ideological victory to the rabid wing of the party.
However, these primary victories are within a small subset of the voters. The turnout for the primary elections is very low at the best of times, so a small, motivated group of voters can choose a party’s official candidates – who the majority of the actual voters in the general election might well find irrational and unsupportable.
Once again, the loopiness of the primary system comes into play. In many states, there are open primaries – which means that you do not even have to be a nominal supporter of a party to vote in its primary to pick the candidates. So now so-called moderate Republicans are trying to persuade black and Latino voters to support them in primaries against the more extremist Tea Party candidates.
Do Ed Miliband and his advisors really know the practical consequences of their zeal for primary elections?

Primary Causes

Ian Williams: US emulation will lead to Labour self-immolation
September 24, 2009 Tribune

Considering primary-style elections to select Labour candidates is just the latest episode in the recent sordid history of unthinking emulation of the United States. The American political system is bogged in complete unwillingness to catch up with the rest of the world in healthcare and it is worth remembering why Congress is gridlocked – or rather lobby-locked. Primary elections are the primary cause of that.

The British emulation of US deregulation that brought about the financial crisis was a secondary effect of the primary system. American bankers pay even more than the health industry to candidates, and they bought deregulation from Congress – cheaply.

To be elected, an American politician must first win a primary election against other candidates nominally in the same party. Anyone who registers as the supporter of a party can vote: they do not have to pay dues to it or even pledge support to its objectives. In around half the states, there are open primaries. That means registered Republicans can pick Democratic candidates.

There is no party money available for primary elections, so it is up to the candidates to finance their own campaigns. In fact, in the absence of any serious party organization there are no membership cards, so anyone with a chequebook can run on any party ticket. For example, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was a registered Democrat, until he decided he could win the Republican nomination more easily – not least because of his own substantial personal fortune. The biggest expense is buying television and radio time for candidates in the primaries.

Less well-endowed politicians have to raise money to compete in primaries. Unsurprisingly, they get their cash from people with money. So in the case of the swing vote of “fiscally responsible Democrats” sabotaging healthcare reform, this means after receiving backing from the health insurance lobbyists. When Senator Max Baucus introduced a healthcare bill last week that totally negated a public insurance option, let alone a single payer system, some lobbyists were bowled over with admiration – he had actually given them more than they had thought politically sustainable.

Senator Baucus proposes compulsory insurance policies that have to be bought from the very companies that give the US the most expensive and least assured and worst covered health system in the world. It must be totally coincidental that last year the health industry provided him with more than $1 million in campaign contributions. This would count as bribery and corruption in most countries, but it is just business as usual in the US and, it would appear, increasingly so in Britain.

Bill Clinton, when he was pioneering “Third Way” politics with his chum Tony Blair, made such fundraising his hallmark – not least because it freed what passed for the Democratic Party from its traditional supporters, unions, working people, and minorities, whom he dismissed as “special interests.” As we know, Blair learned his lessons and sadly Britain is halfway towards the American system. Labour reduced the role of party members and structures, so that the leadership could overlook their opinions and interests. Individual members deserted the party in disillusioned droves, traditional Labour supporters did not vote or, even worse, voted for the British National Party.

In order to weaken the trade unions’ representation, prospective peers, racing car magnates and sundry special interests were tapped for funds. Whereas union officials, local councillors and the like could once enter Parliament, the Labour leadership winnowed out lists to ensure that docile apparatchiks cruised into safe seats.

It is worth remembering that the leadership elections which took place among Labour Party members cost a lot of money – of course, there were more members at the time. Blair’s leadership campaign was in part financed by a magnate who thought he would be good for Israel and was rewarded with a position dealing with the Middle East. Imagine if the constituency were extended even further to all voters, as is being proposed now for parliamentary candidates. It could hand over candidate selection to the likes of Rupert Murdoch or anyone else with the cash to buy a megaphone loud enough to reach the voters. Forget door-stepping candidates: it would be door-stepping hacks, inventing scandals.

Since a primary election would not be an official election, would candidates be able to buy television and radio time to win support? It would be tantamount to returning to the era before the Reform Acts and would effectively put the candidacy for sale to the highest bidder.

Labour should abandon primary elections and get back to primary causes. It should be attracting back those disillusioned members and the only way to do that is to make membership more significant than joining a fan club for whoever the lobbyists have blessed as the Labour candidate, whether for Prime Minister or Member of Parliament.

Elections should be inside the party and they should be open and transparent, with clear rules on finance and the sources of finance for candidates, and rigorous guidelines against conflicts of interest. Labour should address the needs and wants of its natural constituencies if it wants to spur people into voting for it. Otherwise, look across the Atlantic and despair. It should be “Westward no”, not “Westward ho”.

Presidential Runners Jump The Starting Gun

My piece from today's Tribune on the early Presidential primaries in the US. It is, of course the newspaper that George Orwell wrote many of his best essays for.

I do my best..


An unprecedented year before the first actual primary election, the candidates are already waving their placards. The hidden subtext on most of them is “send money to this address.” Any serious candidate has to raise some $100 million– and prepare to blow it all in a very short period. Many states, including major ones like Florida and California, are concentrating their primary dates together in the early part of the year, which means that candidates will have to rely more than ever on expensive TV advertising – not to mention jet rental – to get their messages across.

However, how many of them actually have a message? Or more pertinently, a message that not aimed into attracting the millions needed for the campaign.

By old British Labour standards, Congressman Dennis Kucinich is easily the most principled of the pack. So he definitely won't get the campaign financing, nor will he get the media’s endorsement as one of the favourites. Sadly, integrity does not necessarily imply charisma. Sometimes, it is not enough to have the right policy – as the comedian said "It's the way you tell 'em."

So far consensus on the Democratic side anoints Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as the front-runners, with John Edwards, Joe Biden and others as outsiders. Hillary has an early lock on the money, where her husband’s skills in charming billionaires out of cash were as legendary as his ability to get interns on their knees. She has been trying to appear folksy and human. In reality, the softest thing about her is her teeth, and her real policy has no complexity at all. It is to get herself into the White House by any means necessary.

Over the next year we will see some desperate triangulation as she tries to rally the traditionally liberal segments of the Democrat voter base, blacks, women, unions, gays and the like, while persuading those with money that she will look after them. In particular her support for starting the war and her half-hearted opposition to continuing it, while pandering to the hawkish pro-Israeli campaign contributor by beating the drums for a war in Iran, is going to make her husband's line on marijuana use appear to be the epitome of candour.

Unlike Hillary, Barack Obama unequivocally wants out of the Iraqi maelstrom, but no one is sure of the rest of his policies. However the articulacy and sincerity he exudes are both traits that no recent President has combined, so no wonder he is under attack.

The very lack of experience that his opponents accuse him of could also be an asset, unlike rivals with more Senatorial seniority who have spend several terms brown-nosing campaign contributors. The jibes about his lack of experience are somewhat desparate. George W. Bush’s experience as governor of Texas, with no power except the one he never used too commute the death penalty, was hardly up there with the great political apprenticeships. Carter, Reagan and Bill Clinton all made it on the basis of governorships with no national experience. Nor can Hillary and George W. claim that being respectively the spouse and son of a president is the same as actual experience.

In the complex shifts of the primaries, the unknown factor is how Obama's candidacy affects Clinton's positions. She would prefer, like Tony Blair, to take her base for granted so she can concentrate on swing votes and fundraising from rich lobbyists. But she is now forced to fight off Obama's challenge from a more liberal position.

Watch out for coded attacks from her camp. Already it is being questioned whether the son of a Kenyan father and a White American mother can really be black, and merit the black vote the way that, it is implied, the pure white Hillary can. The school he attended as an infant in Kenya, has, totally spuriously, been described as an Islamic madrassa. Many more winged arrows of outrageous innuendo will be swooshing his way over the next year.

If it is any consolation, on the Republican side, two of the main contenders, Senator John McCain and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani are having a similar internecine battle. Both have previously taken moderate positions, but have to stand on their heads to appeal to the die-hard Christian right. As mayor, Giuliani, despite the halo that inadvertently dropped on his head on September 11, surrounded himself with dubious characters who will now be brought up in evidence against him, as will the socially liberal positions on abortion and the like that he adopted to get elected in New York. Announcing ones divorce at a press conference without telling the spouse was hardly a triumph for family values either.

Perhaps the saddest is McCain, who was thoroughly slimed last time by the Bush team, but has since licked the slime and said how tasty it is. He is moving to the right at close to light speed, but must still worry that the Bush dynasty, despite his loyalty, will suddenly produce someone like Jeb Bush out of the hat, and slime McCain all over again.

It will be an interesting year, but like mud-wrestling, it's much better to be a spectator than a participant, and even then little hope of edification.

Biden, My Part in His Downfall

Latest Guardian "Comment is Free Post"

Of plagiarism and primaries
Joe Biden, former Neil Kinnock plagiarist, shows the full madness of American presidential primaries.

February 2, 2007 07:58 PM
The primary season has started early in the United States. Would-be candidates have been spotted "exploring" Iowa, getting in touch with their feigned inner folksiness - and ready for next year's caucus.

Joe Biden, one of the candidates, was laughed out the race almost two decades ago for plagiarizing a speech made by Neil Kinnock in the 1987 election campaign, during which I worked in the Labour Party leader's office writing speeches and articles. (To be fair, Neil always ended up composing his own speeches based on the input from the writers.)

They were heady times. Ben Elton the comedian used to come to the office after his nightly performances and we would work on jokes late into the night. Big Ben's booming rocked us in our seats every fifteen minutes as little Ben and I, exhausted, worked out quips for the campaign speeches.

But the speech Biden stole was no joke. Neil eloquently depicted what the 1945 Labour government had done for working people in Britain. Generations of Kinnocks had hacked away at the coal face in the South Wales collieries, but he was the first to get to university.

Joe Biden misappropriated the speech in every sense of the word. He had hacked his way through a private academy with a silver spoon. I felt a sense of justice watching him fail.

Now of course, he has appropriated another trait of Neil Kinnock - who tended to take the periods and full stops out of what we wrote. Biden missed a comma while discussing Barack Obama's presidential aspirations - he said Obama was "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" - and walked into a manufactured firestorm over whether or not he had insulted other (presumably less bright and clean) black Americans.

Biden's problems illustrate what is wrong with the weird primary process. Wannabe presidential candidates have to be contortionists as they try to appear inoffensive to as many different constituencies as possible. For example, the US heavily subsidizes converting corn into ethanol - a process that actually consumes more energy than it produces. But the huge subsidies exist in part because the primaries begin in Iowa - the largest producer of ethanol in the country - and thus all candidates must sing the praises of the fuel right from the beginning of the campaign.

And a longer, wackier primary will cost a lot more. Estimates for merely entering the race range from $30m to $100m. And like Will Sutton - who robbed banks, because that's where the money is - almost all the candidates will be going to major lobbying groups to raise cash for their campaigns.

John Edwards supports ending the war in Iraq because he knows that's where the votes are. But in a speech to the Herzliya Institute in Israel, he near enough threatened to start a war with Iran instead, bellicosely saying that no option should be left off the table in dealing with Tehran. Needless to say, pro-Israeli money also plays a big role in campaigns. And who in Florida is going to say it is time to stop pandering to the anti-Castro crazies and drop the embargo on Cuba?

It's not just the Democrats who bend themselves into the political equivalent of Moebius strip. John McCain has been passing as an honourable man, a centrist Republican who was once considered as a potential for vice presidentt on a Democratic ticket. But to win the Republican primaries, he is now transforming himself, or revealing himself - the jury is out on which it is - as a ferocious conservative hack.

The primary system, where candidates mutually vivisect their own party colleagues for a year and then expect voters to turn out in a general election to support exhausted and thoroughly slimed candidates, is a uniquely American process. Which may go a long way to explaining why so few Americans vote in the end.


This entry was tagged with the following keywords: JoeBiden, HillaryClinton, JohnEdwards, JohnMcCain, NeilKinnock, BenElton, AmericanElections

Primary Causes

This is my latest in the Washington Spectator, a magazine well worth subscribing to
Click here The Washington Spectator

PRIMARY ELECTIONS
"Pillar of Democracy" May Be Worse Than Useless
By Ian Williams | 02/01/2007

n recent elections, reform-minded Americans have had their usual doubts about the manifestly undemocratic and clunky Electoral College, and a completely new set of deep doubts have arisen about how accurately the electronic voting systems have recorded the wishes of voters. There has also been some justifiable concern about how partisan election officials have purged the voter rolls. Despite the various concerns, and attempts to address them, the use of primary elections to choose party candidates has, surprisingly, escaped critical examination. People discuss how to make the primaries more efficient, more representative. But the real question should be, why are they held at all?

They are unique to the United States, which is even more anomalous, considering its national reputation, maybe not always deserved, for keeping government out of civic affairs. No other democratic country with embedded electoral traditions allows a state or federal government to determine how political parties choose their candidates or to run elections for them. Although it was only in the 1970s that primaries supplanted party conventions as the means of choosing presidential candidates, familiarity has bred undeserved contentment with the process. Primaries have been part of the U.S. electoral system for a century, and have thus acquired a patina of constitutional respectability, even though the Founding Fathers wisely never mentioned them, nor indeed political parties, for which George Washington and others had a profound distrust. The change has not necessarily advanced democracy, let alone the Democrats.

AN ACCELERATED SCHEDULE—Under discussion now is a move by several state governments to hold their primaries earlier in the year. Nevada is seeking to hold a primary for Democrats before the traditional lead-off polling in New Hampshire, and South Carolina will stage its primary right afterwards. The number of states that participate in Super Tuesday on February 5 could leap next year from six to fourteen, with powerhouses like California, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey joining in. Less than a month after the Iowa caucuses, the nominations could already be decided on both sides.

Since anything that puts an end to the opportunity for auto-evisceration that is a presidential primary has to be a good thing, a concentrated early primary may be welcome news. It would allow a rapid nomination and would give the winning candidate time to brush off some of the mud slung before the general election.

On the other hand, it means that prospective candidates to be the presidential nominee are already on the hoof a year in advance. Already 19 candidates (give or take Newt Gingrich) have declared or are "exploring" a run for president. The very weekend that Hillary Clinton announced that she was "in to win," New Mexico governor Bill Richardson pitched himself as a "uniter, a healer," and Kansas senator Sam Brownback posed as a "full-scale Ronald Reagan conservative." They are all spending freely and are prepared to keep on sprinkling greenbacks for the next year. And after a year, they will have to raise—and spend—even larger sums of money in a very short time to compete in the official primary election circuit.

So the other effect of the concentrated primaries is that the financial barrier for candidates is higher than ever. In general, only the rich need apply—or perhaps even more pernicious, those who are backed by the rich, since as we know, there are the occasional eccentric progressive billionaires.

In fact, instead of tinkering with the details, we might well reconsider the whole tedious and retrogressive machinery of the primaries, perverse both in principle and in practice. Having begun as a means of freeing politics from the smoke-filled rooms of the party machines, they have become the method by which hugely expensive rubber-chicken-filled banqueting rooms dominate politics. It is through the primaries that big money gets most leverage in the political process. A candidate as an individual rather than a party organization has to raise huge amounts of money for a primary election.

The grueling marathon is more a test of who can raise the most campaign cash than who can get the most votes. You may remember that Bill Clinton was not the front-runner early on in 1992. He lost the New Hampshire primary, but he carried on getting money when Paul Tsongas's political base ran out of funds and he had to drop out.

It's not a pretty picture. The primaries are an inverted Darwinian struggle to see which candidate has the least scruples about digging up the most dirt on his rivals, and can spend the most money to broadcast the slurs. Let us remember that the GOP picked up the Willy Horton slur from the Democratic primaries. At the end of this intra-party struggle, the exhausted victor is supposed to rally all the people who have been campaigning against him or her for a year to go out and canvass for the victor in the general election.

The need for money distorts the political campaigns and thus the platforms of the candidates. As a general rule, someone who wants to make the rich less so begins with a considerable handicap in the primaries. Candidates skew their policies towards the checkbooks as much as the voters. Their positions on health care, the Middle East, gun reform, transportation, Cuba, abortion and many other significant issues will be triangulated in a complex political calculus to garner maximum contributions as well as votes.

That is not to say that the voters are without power. Primary voters tend to be self-selected, more committed and ideological than the general electorate. The pernicious effects of that were clear with Bush senior, Bob Dole, and now John McCain, who as Republicans have all had to appear far more rigidly conservative in their positions than their records would otherwise suggest. The good news is that this tends to make them unelectable. The exception to this that has proven the rule is George W. Bush, who managed to sail under false centrist colors because the Christian right knew where his deeply conservative heart really was.

However, even on the Democratic side, the contortions of policy lead to a well-deserved public mistrust of politicians, who tailor their messages to different blocs of voters and check-writers. In January, John Edwards spoke to a conference in Israel, where he implied that he supported war with Iran and talked about keeping "All options on the table," presumably with potential donors in mind, while at the same time he was busily disavowing the war in Iraq for voters. Any candidate who wants to campaign for a single payer health-care system, popular with Democratic voters, can not only kiss goodbye any health insurance company donations but will have to accept that his rivals will clean up from them in return for silence or obfuscation on the issue.

VOTERS' RIGHTS—At present, in most states primary-election voters will have already declared their party allegiances when they come to the polls. To an outsider, this makes a mockery of the secret ballot, since voters' preferences are signaled on the public record for anyone to see. In an ideal world, of course, no harm would come to anyone for voting the wrong way . . . but has anyone noticed anything especially idealistic about the current GOP?

Even accepting that a tick on a registration form gives membership privileges to closed primary voters, there can be few excuses for the mockery of the democratic process that is the "open primary," which lets supporters of the opposing party muscle in and pick your party's candidate. In more than twenty states, you can sabotage the opposition in this way in the privacy of the polling booth. Whatever the views of Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, it is clear that most Democrats in her district wanted her to represent them; but McKinney has twice been unseated by a combination of out-of-state money and Republican crossover votes in an open primary, in between winning a general election handsomely.

In a free society, as long as no criminal activity takes place within independent associations like parties, government should not interfere with how they order their affairs. Why shouldn't Democrats keep Republicans, or indeed professed Independents, from interfering in their internal affairs, one of the most important of which is surely their choice of whom to represent them in election campaigns?
In fact, an American political party has little or no choice about its candidates. It is carpetbagger heaven out there. Anyone with a bankroll can apply. New York's billionaire mayor Mike Bloomberg, a registered Democrat for many years, decided to run on the Republican ticket simply because it was cheaper and easier to buy the nomination.

Supporters of open primaries argue that they "increase voter participation," but there is little evidence of this. Indeed, since those who make this argument often spend so much time filtering the electoral rolls for alleged felons, there is room to doubt their sincerity.

In any case, this imaginary benefit is nullified by a certain reality: that the primaries turn voters into consumers of the policies of any personality with enough cash to run and to advertise themselves with all the sincerity and political content of a new toothpaste. The need to win an unknown and amorphous mass of voters has led to massive expenditures on television advertising, which in turn leads to huge demands for cash and all the consequences. That expenditure spills over into the general election, where at least public financing takes on some of the strain.

In many countries, parties are not allowed to abuse the airwaves in this way. Britain, for example, has very strict limits on spending by candidates. The Supreme Court's laughable invocation of the First Amendment to stop restrictions on spending is reminiscent of Anatole France's comment that "The law in its wisdom allows both the rich and the poor to sleep under the bridges over the Seine."

When campaign donations have such a disproportionate effect on policies, primaries deprive party supporters, or members as they are misnamed, of any real input into candidate or party platforms. In other democratic countries, ordinary party members can usually propose policies, choose—and lose—the leadership of their organizations. The Democratic primaries have been turning the party more and more into a P.O. box for corporate donations and reducing Democratic supporters to voting fodder, which is exactly where Tammany Hall had them before reformers instituted primaries, which were invented to break its power.

MUTING OPPOSITION—The system also has an effect on the political process, serving to make effective opposition much more difficult. In a parliamentary system, shortly after an election the defeated party chooses either to give its leader another chance, or picks someone new to carry the standard, so there is an acknowledged leader of the opposition. With the primaries and the attenuated party system, Democrats in opposition can wallow leaderless for the three years of a presidential term and then tear themselves apart in bitterly contested primaries.

This rudderlessness could afflict Republicans as well as Democrats, but this tends not to be. The Democratic Party still has the vestiges of a grass-roots organization, representing vociferous interest groups. The modern GOP is much more Bolshevik in its ideology and organization. When Karl Rove issues orders, Republican operatives all over the country tend to move in concert. The Democrats have no equivalent commissar, and even if they did, no one would take too much notice.

ALTERNATIVES AND THINGS TO AVOID—Of course, there may be worse things than primaries. In many other countries, where there is proportional representation party bosses dictate who gets on the party list, and in Britain the ever-eager-to-learn Tony Blair has been busily introducing candidate selections that exclude anyone who is insufficiently supportive of his style of leadership. Indeed, he has cemented his control by repelling half the Labour Party's membership since he took office.

As with the introduction of primaries themselves, there are often unintended consequences. It would be foolish to rush in with any kind of panacea when it comes to change, but we should surely be thinking about alternatives. For example:

• Hold the party convention early. In fact, hold it immediately after an unsuccessful presidential election, to choose the leadership and policies for the time in opposition and to give a candidate a good three years to build a reputation with the electorate.

• Build an actual party. There are over sixty million registered Democrats. If they were to join up as real party members, even paying a nominal subscription fee of $10 a year, not only could they fund elections without another corporate check, they would have some serious input in the matter of choosing candidates. A participation fee, no matter how nominal, would be a better test of party loyalty than just ticking a box when registering to vote.

• Use new technology to communicate. At one time, it could be argued that only government had the resources to canvass the opinions of party supporters. Apart from the very poor job that government has been doing in conducting elections recently, the technology and the need are now there for parties to seize control back from the state. With the growth of the Internet, as organizations like MoveOn.org have shown, party activities and fundraising can be much more democratically organized, cutting out expensive and sleazy TV advertising campaigns and putting the voter back in control of policy decisions and candidate choice.

• Consider new voting systems. In many other democracies, first-past-the-post elections have been abandoned for transferable voting systems. More people would vote if they thought that their vote was not wasted in elections where incumbents have a lock on re-election. A transferable vote allows anyone who so desires to vote for a Nader, or any other non-traditional party candidate, and not feel that it would be a wasted ballot, since if the voter's first choice lost, the vote would be moved to a safer alternative. Ireland has multimember constituencies, designed to allow minorities (of all kinds) representation while keeping the close connection between legislators and voters—not dissimilar to the proposals Lani Guinier made that had her swift-boated out of the Clinton Court as a "quota queen."

With its electronic voting, Supreme Court election-fixing and Homeland Security, American democracy appears less and less of a given with each presidential signing statement. Time may be running out for a critical examination of things we've taken for granted but that have led us to this pass.

©Copyright 2007, Public Concern Foundation Inc.