Let's get 20th Century

A hundred years ago they knew something

I’m old and can remember (just barely) the days of “favorite son” candidates for President — guys like Harold Stassen who ran mainly to increase their own power at home, or to lock up the delegates of their state for leverage at their national convention (though occasionally one of them would get lucky and win the nomination).

Consider New York Governor Al Smith at the 1920 Democratic National Convention, who (as described in Matthew and Hannah Josephson’s Al Smith: Hero of the Cities) came to San Francisco “to have the honor, purely formal, of being nominated for President of the United States as New York’s Favorite Son.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, seconded Smith’s nomination (“I love him as a friend, look up to him as a man”). Smith and the New Yorkers then sat around, waiting for the right moment in the battle between William McAdoo and James Cox to throw Smith’s 70 New York delegates to Cox and break the thing open. When Cox had it in the bag, he picked Roosevelt for Vice President; Smith made the nominating speech. (In 1928 Roosevelt nominated Smith for the Presidency — which he lost — while Smith boosted Roosevelt for Governor, which he won.)

These candidacies, such as they were, were an artifact of old-fashioned, hard-nosed politics: cagey, thoroughly transactional, fairly amoral. There’s something about that I like. The candidates’ business was vote-rustling, not a grand crusade, and everybody knew what they were in for. And as the device was not based on principle, it was eminently disposable; when the convention broke up, the vote-wrangler would lick his wounds, stow the favors he had won for future use, and join his comrades in the really important business of winning victory for the party in November.

Favorite sons have been gone a while (though some de facto fave sons emerge), and so has the character of politics they represented. Flash forward to the current Democratic field: Candidates are presumed to represent not only their own ambitions, but also and mainly ideological constituencies — indeed, in the case of, say Warren v. Sanders or Biden v. Klobuchar, micro-constituencies, splinters of a particular sub-frequency of their piece of the political spectrum.

And the more micro the constituency, the more bitter the contention in public hangouts like Twitter. In real life I assume most Sanders fans, if disappointed in their quest, would still support Warren if she were nominated. But at the moment the battle between supporters of Sanders’ version of Medicare for All and Warren’s is nearly as fierce as if the two candidates were in entirely different parties.

In a way this is to the good — issues are important, even down to faint shades of meaning; people who get worked up over things like this are certainly engaged in the political process and bring energy to it.

But the energy hasn’t been exactly positive lately. It seems almost cosmically just that, in this season of endless recrimination and retribution over the Houston Astros’ cheating, we’re also hearing so much complaining about how the primaries and even the media coverage of them are unfair, even rigged.

Now, to a great extent, these complaints are fair. The media has certainly bollocksed up the primaries and so has the party itself, with the botched Iowa primary and the backdoor sneak-in of megadonor Michael Bloomberg just the most recent shady examples. (Also, as with the Astros, the refusal of the responsible parties to own up to their faults just makes it all worse.)

But the complaints, amplified by our always-on social media, have cast a thick, grey pall over what once upon a time was a rowdy, often dirty, definitely not optimal, but exciting and even invigorating political ritual.

And I would make a distinction between the corruption of the political system under which we live — which is important to expose and expunge at every turn — and the corruption of party politics, which is something more like the internal squabbles of a local Parent-Teacher Association, except much more visible and therefore easier to make fun of. The reason our citizens’ faith in politics is so damaged is that our parties are so fucked up — but maybe one of the parties will get tired of being a laughing stock and clean up its act.

At some point I hope we can get little more 20th-Century about this. It’s not that the candidates and their backers in the old days didn’t have causes, God knows. (We could all use a little Franklin D energy right now.) It’s that they didn’t confuse their cause with the game, and they knew better than to get caught up too much with balls and strikes.