By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
Cleveland — It
was reported late in the second day of the GOP convention that a large number
of Republican National Committee staffers were stricken with the norovirus.
Most commonly associated with the sorts of gastrointestinal crises aboard
cruise ships that attract wall-to-wall CNN coverage, the norovirus is known for
inducing bouts of “explosive diarrhea and vomiting,” according to various news
reports.
Given that the presidential primary season has been
figuratively bowel-stewing, it only seems fitting that it might end with such
on-the-nose literalism.
In fairness, even if the convention went off swimmingly,
it would have still been a failure. And I don’t mean because Donald Trump
promised celebrity glitz but delivered former sitcom star Scott Baio and former
soap opera star Antonio Sabato Jr. Even boring Mitt Romney had Clint Eastwood.
Nor am I referring to the political malpractice that
allowed Melania Trump to introduce herself to the country as a plagiarist. I
have sympathy for Mrs. Trump. Obviously, the media overreacted to the
plagiarism, but such overreactions are exactly why parties script out their
conventions down to the punctuation marks. The media only want to cover what
goes wrong, so you aim not to give them the opportunity. As a matter of ethics,
the plagiarism was a triviality. But for the staffers who let it happen, it was
a capital offense.
No, the convention was a failure before it even began.
Because most of us have only known political conventions as stage-managed
infomercials, we’ve come to think that’s their actual purpose: to throw a grand
party for the candidate who won the most delegates. But conventions predate
that function by more than a century.
Before telephones and modern transportation, the only way
for a political party to form a consensus around a candidate was to actually
meet face to face. Negotiating complicated deals by mail is hard (and risky;
many political bargains are best not put in writing). A convention was the way
to do that. The goal wasn’t to pick a candidate whom a bare majority or slim
plurality of delegates loved and a large minority couldn’t stand. It was to
find the candidate most acceptable to the most people.
Imagine the candidates were ice cream flavors. Some
people love chocolate. Others love strawberry. But many of the strawberry
people hate chocolate, and the chocolate fans are #NeverStrawberry. A few
diehard types are all in for rocky road or pistachio. If no consensus could be
formed, the bosses would retreat to smoke-filled rooms and figure out what
flavor everyone could live with. And the answer was often vanilla. There’s a
reason vanilla is the most popular ice cream in America — not because it’s the
favorite of the most people, but because no one dislikes vanilla.
That’s the original purpose of conventions: to find the
candidate the party could unify around. Since the rise of the modern primary
system, we switched to the practice of putting it all up for a vote. Whoever
gets a majority of delegates in primary elections is the nominee. This wasn’t a
problem most years because all of the candidates were ultimately acceptable to
the party. People grumbled about this or that candidate (I certainly did), but
there was no #NeverDole or #NeverRomney movement.
This time is different. Countless leading Republicans
skipped this convention, including all of the living previous nominees, save
for Bob Dole. Most delegates in attendance have made their peace with Donald
Trump, but a very large number have not. The Trump boosters think this is all
sour grapes, and that’s an understandable reaction. What they can’t (or won’t)
see is that Trump is viewed by many conservatives as an imposter and hijacker.
The Trump campaign tried to fix this problem by selecting
Indiana governor Mike Pence as his running mate, but Trump stomped on that
message by fumbling his announcement and then, in a joint interview with 60 Minutes, treating Pence like a
glorified intern. The message for many conservatives wasn’t that Trump was
embracing conservatism, but that he was willing to condescend to it.
The TV cameras may show a lot of excited delegates
cheering Trump on the floor. What the cameras can’t show is the discontent
represented by those who refused to attend in the first place — nor the
grumbling distress deep in the bowels of the Grand Old Party.
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