CHAPTER 1
Change and Stability in Choosing Presidents
ALEXANDER HEARD AND MICHAEL NELSON
For two decades politically active Americans have been preoccupied with proposals to change the way they choose their presidents. Substantial change actually has occurred. Actions taken by the parties radically modified the means of nominating candidates; offical actions by government spread the suffrage and altered campaign funding; and informal campaign practices evolved, some quickly and others gradually.
These essays address the significance of four recent and important trends in the presidential selection process and one continuing concern.
1. Changes have occurred in the world context in which American government is conducted.
2. The pools of volunteers who dominate American politics—voters, contributors, political activists, aspiring candidates, and officeholders— have been changing.
3. The structure and technologies of presidential campaigns also have been changing, as reflected recently in opinion sampling, campaign coordination and organization, and political finance.
4. Innovations in the mass media have always affected political processes, but never more so than recently.
5. The presidency can become vacant between Elections under many different circumstances. There is much disagreement about these possibilities and the potential consequences if any of them should arise.
The concerns, analyses, and proposals that appear here reflect the important attention that scholars are giving to the way Americans choose their presidents.
A New World Context
American presidential selection usually is studied as part of the unique set of circumstances, historical conditions, and traditions that constitute the United States. Comparisons are drawn between the present and previous eras. Is the modern system of Primaries and caucuses, for example, more or less democratic, more or less effective, more or less legitimate, than when national party conventions dominated the nominating process? Assessments of the influence of party organizations, the mass Media, interest groups, financial contributors, issues activists, and others ordinarily accept the traditional contours of American politics as fixed. Similarly, when proposals are made to reform presidential selection, often through changes in the constitutionally prescribed structure of the government, the normal frame of reference is past practice in the United States.
Our interest here is not to propose a new constitutional system. But we do wish to explore whether Americans can benefit from considering the effect of present selection procedures on American international relations, and also whether they can learn anything applicable to the United States from practices for choosing political leaders that are followed in other nations.
The issues, interests, and ambitions that animate American presidential Elections are primarily domestic, but the consequences are at least as important to the world as to the nation. On the great issues of war and peace, Ralf Dahrendorf observes in his essay on "Presidential Selection and Continuity in foreign Policy" that it is the president of the United States who is largely responsible for "whether the world lives in a climate of tension or of detente, of arms race or of disarmament talks." Similarly, Ernest May, in "Changing International Stakes in Presidential Selection," suggests that much of the international economy is dependent on presidential policies that, although vitally important to people outside the United States, are not controlled by them.
Both Dahrendorf and May discover obstacles to the responsible exercise of American military and financial power in presidential selection practices. Dahrendorf finds a potent tension between the imperatives of becoming president and those of being president: "Candidates for president are chosen and elected primarily for domestic reasons, yet once elected their most consequential responsibilities are in the international field." Electoral pressures may move a candidate to endorse a protectionist trade policy or to attack international agreements that offend certain groups—even at the risk of alienating allies and making all nations question the reliability of the United States as an actor in world affairs. "During the early primaries in particular," writes May, candidates "are often put questions by zealots who want to test the degree of commitment to their particular cause." Democrats in 1984, for example, outdid each other in pledging their fealty to such policies as a proposed "nuclear freeze" and the transfer of the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. "Such performances make many Americans nervous," May observes. "Understandably, they make foreigners even more so."
Dahrendorf also regards the sheer volatility of presidential politics as unsettling in its international consequences. Because "the role of the presidency is supreme" in foreign policymaking, new presidents can bring rapid and dramatic changes in policy that are disturbing to others. Dahrendorf characterizes as "staggering" and "unbelievable" the dramatic swings in policy that have occurred in recent years. Control of the presidency has passed from Richard Nixon and his "cynical geopolitics" to Jimmy Carter's "moralism of a good partner," and then to Ronald Reagan's "new patriotism of a combination of missionary isolationism and crude power motives."
Yet Dahrendorf and May, despite full sensitivity to the difficulties to which the presidential selection process contributes, each find it, on balance, to be healthy. Prudence is the quality that foreigners most desire in American presidents, according to May, and prudence is what American Voters have given them. "Most of the time, the nominating process [has] winnowed out just about everyone whose approach was not careful, prudent, and risk-minimizing," he argues. "In instances in any way exceptional, the voters nearly always chose the more prudent-seeming candidate when the general election came around." Especially in the nuclear age, adds Dahrendorf, this desire for prudence has bound Americans and foreigners together, forging "an ultimate and unbreakable link...
