The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
…Joe Biden would certainly not be a presidential candidate in 2024, Donald Trump might not be, and presumably that would satisfy a sizeable majority of American voters among both parties, although it would be no guarantee that whoever were chosen as the two candidates might not be any more acceptable to innumerable fickle voters who might not know habeas corpus from corpus delicti…
…The Electoral College (a necessary compromise in 1787 but a terribly undemocratic idea since the disastrous presidential election of 1800) might have no bearing on any presidential election in modern times and thus might be given the very democratic coup de grace it has so richly deserved from the beginning of the American Republic…
…Hundreds of millions or billions of dollars would not be needlessly spent trying to lure millions of relatively uninformed people to vote for candidates, many of whom the parties would never even consider as candidates, if they were the ones doing the choosing…
…Americans would not be subjected to the dispiriting and dismaying process of putting up with two years of having to hear, watch, or read candidates or journalists say more or less the same things every day and night for those two years, causing many Americans to avoid politics altogether by refusing to vote, which is a very bad thing…
…The length of presidential primary campaigns has steadily increased since the concept was first widely followed after Teddy Roosevelt, a former president, decided to challenge William Howard Taft, then an incumbent president, for the Republican presidential nomination, thus allowing Woodrow Wilson, a Princeton professor who at least had had the political experience of being governor of New Jersey before running for the Democratic nomination as president, to become president, and though he was not old he suffered a serious stroke, enabling his second wife Edith to become the un-elected acting president for several months, which was not a good thing at all and probably would not happen now because investigative journalists and pundits would raise such a clamor that the vice-president would become the president because of Section 4 of Amendment XXV, an excellent amendment which has never been exercised…
…Elderly professional politicians such as Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Grassley might be among the other professional politicians who would choose presidential candidates, but because of their age they would never be considered themselves…
…Professional politicians would almost certainly veto any proposed candidates who had served in no political offices such as Donald J, Trump (yes, please!) or Dwight D. Eisenhower (no, don’t!), because having no political experience at all might be thought too risky for anyone to be a candidate for president, no matter how able that person might be…
…Very well-organized and/or very rich and/or very zealous political novices would never be able to convince long-term, well-respected party leaders to select someone they knew would not stand a mean-Martian’s chance in heaven of getting a presidential nomination from long-or-short-of-tooth reputable party veterans…
Politics is far too important for the selection of presidential candidates to be left up to a populace who, as well-intentioned as they might be, are amateurs regarding what to a necessary extent must be THE professional position of all positions in American politics. Only the leaders of the national parties have the acquaintanceship and necessary means of observation to know who the best candidates are who represent the ideals and broadly affirmed political values of their particular parties.
As long as we have had presidential primaries, they have almost always resulted in the selection of sufficiently popular candidates, but the populace are not the best judges of who would be the most qualified and thus the most successful candidates. Without doubt, party leaders could also make big mistakes. However, they are less likely to do so than a too often mis-informed, mis-aligned, and mis-guided electorate.
Because of safety laws enacted in every state of our Union, providentially there will be no more smoke-filled rooms in politics. Besides, smoke might cloud or clog wise thinking. At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Hubert Humphrey, the vice-president from Minnesota, who did not compete in a single presidential primary, was chosen over Senator Eugene McCarthy, also from Minnesota, who ran in almost every state to win the party nomination. The McCarthy supporters were enraged, and there was hell to pay in the streets of Chicago. At the time, I was living in Chicago, and observed the melee on television and fortunately not on the streets. If there had never been presidential primaries, that brouhaha would not have occurred, and Mr. Humphrey would have been nominated in the way nominees were selected before 1912.
We the people should elect our presidents, but the two major political parties should nominate the candidates. – February 29, 2024
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.