Appetite for self-destruction

This is a follow-up the Dan’s post about the arguments for and against a genuinely open convention, in the event that Biden withdraws from the race. First, a note on that. At present, the DNC is setting a virtual roll call vote for some date between August 1 and August 7, inclusive. The final date within that range will be set next week.

From a practical perspective, I think this means that Joe Biden probably needs to make some sort of definitive final statement within the next 12 days, addressing in a straightforward way the fact that at present a very large percentage of both Democratic elites and Democratic voters want him to withdraw. ETA: Thinking a bit more about this, it might make more sense for Biden to hold some public event with the Democratic congressional leadership, at which he acknowledges the concerns people have raised, emphasizes that the party isn’t a cult of personality and discussion is therefore not something to be suppressed, and announces that after careful consideration he’s decided to remain in the race, and that the party leadership is here to confirm their ultimate support of this decision.

If his decision is to remain in the race, then, given the timing of the current DNC process, such a statement should be the end of the matter. After all, the final decision remains in his hands, and, if he is going to be the candidate, the party needs finality on that score sooner rather than later. In other words, everyone in a position of any influence who wants to have any sort of say regarding or effect on this process needs to speak now, or forever hold their peace.

As to the question of what should happen if he decides to withdraw, I can’t emphasize strongly enough that I think the idea of an open convention is a really terrible one. We have two historical models for choosing major party presidential candidates. First, we had the old model in which party elites, consisting of elected federal and state officials, and the leaders of various important party-affiliated interest groups, would be wooed for months and sometimes years by aspiring nominees, so that these elites could decide on a candidate, generally at the party convention itself. In this model, primaries, if any, were generally non-binding beauty contests, designed to gauge public sentiment, in a context in which public sentiment was a factor in the party elites’ decision making process.

The other model is the relatively new — really since 1968/1972 — democratic primary process, in which voters essentially pick the candidate, subject to various constraints (super delegates and the like).

Both of these processes have their strengths and weaknesses of course, but what’s easy to lose sight of at the present extraordinary moment is that an “open convention,” should Biden withdraw in the next few days, would have almost nothing to do with either of these models. Obviously an open convention would involve a jettisoning altogether of the new model, except to the extent that Kamala Harris can argue — quite forcefully in my view — that the primary process gives her candidacy a degree of democratic legitimacy that no other candidate can claim, given that primary voters were picking a Biden-Harris ticket (they were picking this ticket with no serious opposition but that in itself remains a significant fact).

Perhaps less obviously, an open convention, and whatever radically truncated campaign process takes place before it, would also have basically no resemblance to the old model of party elites making a choice after many months of formal and informal campaigning by prospective nominees. Instead, what this would be, essentially, would be a several-day job interview by aspirants to the job of Democratic candidate for president in 2024.

And that is simply a terrible model for choosing a candidate. This is so for many reasons, including the fact that reams of social science research tend to confirm that job interviews in general are a bad way of filling jobs considerably less important than president of the United States. What job interviews end up telling the interviewers is how much they like the candidate on a personal level, which is something that turns out, in general, to have almost no correlation whatsoever with future job performance.

A closely related point is that both the old and new models required candidates to engage in a long complex process, that in different ways bore some resemblance to what the head of a political governing party would be expected to do — engage in elaborate negotiations with different constituencies, to achieve a workable consensus on difficult issue, for example.

Under these circumstances, the candidates are going to be tested on well they come off in what will be essentially a several-day, or at best two or three week, reality TV show. It would make about as much sense to choose the candidate by holding a spelling bee or a hot dog eating contest.

The alternative to this remains straightforward: if Joe Biden chooses to withdraw, he gives his passionate, unambiguous endorsement to Kamala Harris, and urges his delegates to vote for her. This would produce an enormous upwelling of good will across the party. That would combine with an understandable unwillingness to engage in a bizarre and inevitably fractious process to choose from among a group of potential candidates who, under these circumstances, can hardly be expected to produce any real evidence that any of them would be a better choice than Harris. These factors, I believe, would assure her nomination.

But the last thing the party should do is invent some brand-new, completely improvised process, to make up for the fact that, for both good reasons and bad, the conventional process failed to produce the eventual nominee. Such a thing would not be an “open convention” so much as it would be a recipe for disaster.