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People vote in a crosscurrent of emotions and interests. In 1984 the crosscurrents of a new culture and a new resistance shaped the election as much as or more than the debate on missile confrontation, budget deficits or the trade war. Nor do these crosscurrents show any sign of abating, or the passion of the clerics any sign of softening.
There remains then a last ugly legacy of the 1984 election to the election of 1988: that all the new underswells and surges will have to find their way to a decision through a system of presidential politics now grown so obsolete as to be dangerous.
Simply put, somewhere in the past 20 years the U.S. political system became entangled in rules and customs that make it more vulnerable to special-interest groups than ever before, and television makes this even worse.
The primary system, where choice of candidates begins, is now as absurd as the presidential system before the passage of the 20th Amendment, which reorganized presidential and congressional tenures. The old rules of national elections held that a President elected in November could not take office until March; a Congress elected with him could not take office, unless in an emergency, for 13 months after the election. That system could not work in the 20th century of airplanes and telecommunications, so it was changed.
The primary system today bounces crazily from state to state, hobbled by bizarre party regulations, dominated by the dramatic needs of television. Few except scholars and specialists understand the labyrinthine rules that govern the sequence of nomination. New York has changed its nominating rules four times in the past four elections. In California, once a winner-take-all state, no candidate now runs statewide—and no one yet knows by how many votes Hart whipped Mondale in the Democratic primary. In Texas a voter must vote once on Saturday morning and once more in the evening to have his vote count for local delegates, who will then be mysteriously manipulated up the ladder of layered caucuses for a final choice. One could go on to more outlandish and contradictory rules, laws, regulations. This unworkable system leaves both the parties and the candidates prey to local and hard-bitten pressure groups, from the National Rifle Association to the Sierra Club, from the antiabortion zealots to the equally tough leaders of the women's movement.
In New England, in spring, candidates must talk about the price of heating oil. In New York candidates must cultivate Jews, blacks, Italians, to the exclusion of other groups. In Texas and California they must court Hispanic voters. In the farm and industrial states they must woo farmers whose needs conflict with those of steelworkers in Pennsylvania or Ohio.
What emerges is political bedlam and national boredom. But there are other more troubling results: not least the total exhaustion of the candidates, who must perform as political athletes, operating by glands, not by reason; and just as important—the inability of any schoolteacher to tell students approaching voting age how the nation chooses its leaders.
Many professional politicians will say, off the record, that our system of politics is too important to be left to self-chosen