The silly season is upon us. The presidential primary season is just around the corner and for the third time in a row a relatively unpopular president is likely to be reelected while his opposition is in disarray.
Almost alone among European democracies, the United States elects leaders on the basis of their campaign skills, not their governing skills. We elect the best TV performer — the best campaigner — regardless of previous experience. In Britain, only three people can be leader of the nation — the heads of the Labor, Conservative and Liberal Democratic parties. No other members of parliament, no mayor or military figure, no business or media titan, no sports or entertainment celebrity, can vie for the prime ministership.
Britain and other parliamentary systems have real leaders — seasoned, experienced politicians who have worked their way up the ladder to the executive level, overseeing their respective parties. They have to be members of parliament, of course, which means that they have extensive public voting records on the entire range of domestic and foreign policy issues. They are not self-nominated; they are party-nominated.
Contrast this with the silly American practice of allowing anyone, however inexperienced, to run for president. By no stretch of the imagination was John F. Kennedy leader of his party in 1960 — or Barry Goldwater leader of his in 1964. Jimmy Carter, briefly governor of Georgia, was a fringe figure in 1976, as was Bill Clinton in 1992. The man with the thinnest resume of all was probably Barack Obama in 2008, a Senate short-termer who had scarcely held any full-time job in his life. But JFK, Carter, Clinton and Obama all became media celebrities, puffed up by the TV-oriented media of their respective decades. As a result, we have had amateurs in the White House more often than not.
The problem is that in the United States political parties have no leaders. Who is the leader of the Republican Party today? The Senate leader is Mitch McConnell and the House leader is John Boehner. On a charisma scale of one to ten, McConnell would be, charitably, a one — and Boehner about a three. But neither really speaks for the party in the way that a party leader in Britain does. The chairman of the Republican National Committee is Reince Priebus, a virtual unknown whose name is difficult to spell or pronounce. The last Republican speaker of the House before Boehner was Denny Hastert, unknown to most Americans by name or face. Yet the speaker of the House, if we had the British system, would be prime minister and leader of the nation.
The party with a president in office does have a leader, if only for a few years. Ostensibly, Barack Obama, a part-time university lecturer, is the leader of the Democratic Party by virtue of the power and influence he yields. But when he leaves office (hopefully in less than two years), the Democrats will be wandering in the same wilderness the Republicans are in now. The Republicans, if they had any organization and dynamism, could help the situation in two ways: one, by establishing a Republican policy council that could speak for the party; two, by downgrading the primaries by cutting the number of delegates that can be won in them. The frontloading of primaries by both parties has helped accelerate the foolish media circus that accompanies them (along with the cattle show of “candidates” on stage in so-called debates). The Republican Party has taken the lead in trying to tame the primaries by spacing them out (though that effort is now encountering opposition from Florida Republicans). But much more needs to be done to restore party discipline and common sense to the nominating process.
The current system, which favors media celebrities (and creates them), is being exploited by Donald Trump (no experience in government) and Michele Bachmann (four years in the House of Representatives). Obama, with a few years in the U.S. Senate, is leading the nation into bankruptcy and unprecedented military vulnerability, as nuclear weapons are acquired by dictators far and near. John F. Kennedy, the youngest president ever elected, stumbled into disastrous policies toward Cuba and Vietnam early in his first term, revealing his inexperience in foreign affairs. Trump, Bachmann and Sarah Palin all lack the experience to be president and all would lose to Obama. Yet all are TV celebrities of the moment and are taken seriously as candidates.
Republicans might even have held their nominating convention a year early to set up their candidate for a full year of public confrontation with Obama. Someone as experienced as Mitt Romney, if the nominee, could then have avoided a fratricidal election-year struggle with other Republicans and would have become a strong spokesman for his party. The public would know where Republicans stand on the issues and who the Republican president would be. Instead, we are headed for another silly season and more self-nominated “candidates,” from a party with no real voice.
James Delmont is a widely published journalist and college teacher with a PhD in history. He has recently finished a book, The Great Liberal Death Wish.