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From Super to Final Tuesday
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14622 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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5 / 1988 |
3,005 Words |
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Bill Whalen
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There are two places to go these days for a serious discussion on brokering. One is a Wall Street office, the other is the Democratic presidential campaign's back room.
With approximately half its delegates already committed and no one candidate having made a clean break to the front of the pack, the Democratic Party seems destined to hold a brokered convention this summer in Atlanta. That's the conclusion one gets after examining what's left of the primary season.
There is an important distinction to make when discussing the possibilities of a brokered convention. First, the candidates themselves could do some horse-trading and pick their own candidates for president and vice present. This doesn't seem very likely, since there are plenty of hard feelings in what already has been a campaign of bruised egos.
The more likely scenario is for a third party--former Ambassador Robert Strauss and Democratic Chairman Paul Kirk are two names being tossed about--to mediate between the candidates. Either way, expect the Democrats to have a nominee before the convention begins. The last thing they want is a bloodbath that spills over onto network television.
A recent trend in presidential elections has been for voters to take their time before settling on the Democratic nominee. In 1976 for example, Jimmy Carter emerged after the final primary in California with only 85 percent of the delegates he needed to "go over the top" at the convention. Similarly, in 1984, Walter Mondale emerged from California still shy of the magic number.
The big difference between then and now is that both Carter and Mondale possessed a sense of inevitability that none of this year's Democratic hopefuls presently enjoys. Carter, for example, emerged as the front-runner coming out of Iowa and New Hampshire, and never really looked back. Mondale survived 1984's Super Tuesday, then proceeded to polish off his chief rival, former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, in Illinois. In both cases, the front-runner emerged from the final day of voting in California and New Jersey with the perception that if the nomination wasn't exactly in the bag, it soon would be.
The situation is different in 1988, thanks to three factors: a somewhat lackluster group of candidates, a fickle electorate, and new rules for the selection of delegates. First, consider the candidates. The first Democrat to show signs of becoming a true front-runner--Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt--started off fast with a victory in the Iowa caucuses, a second-place finish in New Hampshire, and another first in South Dakota. Gephardt's campaign died on the track in the South, however, when he finished a distant fourth on Super Tuesday.
The brokered convention
Theoretically, a Democrat should have broken away from the pack on March 8, when one candidate could have amassed enough convention delegates to leap ahead of his rivals. Such was the case on the Republican side, as Vice President George Bush's performance across the South sent New York Rep. Jack Kemp to the showers and doomed the candidacies of Kansas Sen. Robert Dole and former television broadcaster Pat
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