« Vice and virtues | Main | Great expectations »
October 24, 2008
Electoral conclusion
Election day is no longer weeks, months, or years away. In a few short days, Americans will elect either Barack Obama or John McCain as president. If the race has seemed interminable, that's because in many respects it has been. The jockeying for the Republican and Democratic nominations began as soon as John Kerry conceded in November 2004, and the pace has never really slowed since then. From the standpoint of pure theater, the process has been extraordinary, for both those who love politics and those who loathe it. But from the standpoint of sound policy and good governance, it is important to reflect on whether the custom of the “non-stop campaign” is a useful thing.
Arguably, the lengthy primary campaigns worked well for both parties. Hillary Clinton was long considered the front-runner among Democrats, despite the national campaign experience of John Edwards and the star-potential and Barack Obama. Indeed, until the very end of 2007, Clinton held significant leads in almost every national poll and in most state polls (with the crucial exception of Iowa). Obama held huge public rallies and raised vast sums of money but his debate performances were uneven and he found it difficult to shake the impression that he was something of a policy lightweight.
But prolonged time on the campaign trail proved to be a determining factor for each candidate. The presumptive nature of Hillary Clinton's campaign did not always wear well and left the door open to plausible alternatives. The inconsistencies between John Edwards' words and actions seemed to multiply over time, raising concerns about his candidacy. And Barack Obama's organizational and fundraising skills over the long months of 2007 kept his candidacy solvent as his gained national exposure and experience. Even after the primary elections finally began and the race devolved into a tough slog between Obama and Clinton, each candidate benefited from the lengthy race. Obama proved he could handle a tough, national campaign, and after her initials setbacks in January and February 2008, Clinton was able to adjust her strategies to ensure that the race persisted until June.
In the Republican race, John McCain entered as the front-runner due to his national exposure and his appealing biography. But as 2007 wore on, he did not maintain that position. Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney raised more money and led in more polls, Ron Paul earned a passionate grassroots following, Fred Thompson was drawn into the race on a wave of enthusiasm, and Mike Huckabee saw a late boom in popularity. For a significant portion of the year, party insiders and reporters wrote off John McCain's campaign. But the length of the primary season gave him the opportunity to retool his campaign, and he eventually secured the Republican nomination well before the Democrats settled their battle.
The length of the Republican race also provided McCain and the other candidates an opportunity to reframe their message to match the particular political moment. President Bush's popularity has been steadily declining over the past few years, and as the Republican primary progressed, the candidates were forced to modulate their levels of overt support for the president. Likewise, the situation in Iraq seemed to improve markedly over the course of 2007. This worked to the great benefit of McCain, who had long emphasized his criticism of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's handling of the war as well as his support of Bush's newer “surge” strategy, which coincided with the declining levels of violence in that country.
Although the length and intensity of this particular presidential campaign is unprecedented, it should not have been unanticipated. The lengthy campaign season is a product of the fundamental structure of U.S. politics. The Constitution provides for a presidential executive, with term lengths and even election dates specified in the text itself. This means two things. First, everyone knows when elections will be held. Each party has developed extensive organizational machinery around the chronological constant that presidents are elected every four years, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. This has lead to an arms race, of sorts. If one party begins its primary campaign in earnest one year before the election in a given cycle, the opposing party will begin to campaign 18 months before election day in the next cycle. State laws, party regulations, and simple custom govern how early the actual voting begins. But no such constraints exist on organizing, fundraising, and otherwise laying the groundwork for the voting itself.
Second, the system is not perfectly responsive to changes in popular opinion. Essentially, electing the president represents a poll of U.S. public opinion, held once every four years. But public opinion—and political reality—changes far more frequently than that. Just compare the state of U.S. and global politics in November 2000, in November 2004, and November 2008. The most important issues each year vary so greatly as to be nearly unrecognizable from election cycle to election cycle. Certainly, no one in 2000 could have predicted what would be the most important issues in 2004, nor could anyone in 2004 have identified the driving issues in 2008. Should new issues arise in between presidential elections, or should the president see great swings in popularity, the electorate has no means of formally expressing their collective opinion. And because the president is not directly accountable to Congress, mid-term elections only have a limited effect in transmitting the views of the electorate toward the executive.
It is not this way in many other countries. Indeed, when compared with other democracies, the U.S. presidential system is relatively unique. In parliamentary systems such as in the United Kingdom and in Canada, the chief executive is the leader of the party or coalition with the most seats in parliament. By definition, they are directly accountable to the legislature. Elections for certain houses of parliament may be held on a fixed schedule, and elections for the main house must be held within a certain period (typically no more than 5 years) from the last vote. But election dates cannot be predicted infinitely into the future. Prime ministers either call for elections on their own, or parliaments can declare that they have “no confidence” in the prime minister and force an election. Although parliamentary systems have their own downsides, they do not face many of the same disadvantages of the U.S. presidential system. Because election dates cannot be predicted with certainty years (or decades) in advance, parties and candidates cannot hold perpetual campaigns in the same way that they can in the United States. And because events can force contemporaneous elections, the executive must be more responsive to the changing opinions of the electorate.
Canada, for example, held federal elections this year. On September 7, Prime Minister Stephen Harper asked Canada's Governor General to dissolve parliament and call for early elections. She did so, and parliamentary elections were held five weeks later, on October 14. Anyone following politics in Canada knew that Harper wanted to expand his Conservative plurality in Parliament to a full majority and that he was required by law to call for new elections within the next year. The fact that he called for elections when he did, then, was not a complete surprise, and members of parliament and their potential opponents had ample time to plot their campaign strategies. But the process in Canada provided for a specific beginning and end to the campaign season, which itself represented a fraction of the time spent by U.S. politicians campaigning for higher office (as president or in Congress). Harper surely called for an election when he did because he felt that it would benefit his party. But this belief was based on the political realities at the time; it was the public mood, in part, that prompted the government to let them cast their votes for who should represent them in Parliament. In the United States, the public mood has no effect on when the people choose their representatives.
The United States will never adopt a parliamentary system, and even if it could, there would be strong arguments to be made against doing so. But the length and expense and pageantry and (sometimes maddening) pervasiveness of political campaigns in the United States is not due simply to partisanship, or to cultural issues, or to 527 groups, soft money, or bundled contributions. It is simply a consequence of the way the U.S. government is built. This fact may be of little consequence as the election builds to its climax and as voters choose between Barack Obama and John McCain. But it is important to remember that as much as elections shape the structure of government, the structure of government also determines which kinds of politics are permissible and effective, and which are not. And if there isn't time to reflect on these issues now, there may be a spare moment or two on November 5.
Foreign Policy Association, 23 October 2008
Posted by Daniel Widome at 12:05 AM to U. S. Politics
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.watsonblogs.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1638
