Keep the conflict coming

By Gordon Robison, Special to Gulf NewsPublished: March 11, 2008, 23:41

Generals, it is said, often make the mistake of re-fighting the last war. Can the same charge be levelled against political journalists?
The ever-extended contest for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination is, for the Democrats, a terrible thing. Sooner or later either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will win, but by that time the party will have been so thoroughly ripped asunder that John McCain and the Republicans will have little trouble winning November's general election. Or so the theory of the moment holds.
It's odd, actually. America's political class has spent decades complaining about the ever-more-compressed way the US picks its presidential candidates. The system puts a premium on money and name recognition. It gives Iowa and New Hampshire outsized roles in winnowing the field of candidates. It is designed (particularly on the Republican side) to avoid messy fights at the party convention by handing someone the nomination as quickly as possible.
Everyone (outside Iowa and New Hampshire) professes not to like this system. Yet every four years we go through it again, usually starting — and finishing — a bit earlier than we did the previous time around.
Suddenly, however, the Democrats have a real contest on their hands, and the consensus among people who practice (or talk about) politics for a living is that the messiness on display can only hurt the party.
The theory is that parties must, above all, present a unified face to the world because nobody wants to vote for a party that can't make up its own mind who should represent it. In American politics this is especially reinforced by memories of the 1968 Democratic convention, where clashes between police and protestors outside the hall came to overshadow the highly contentious debates inside it.
Not scripted
Over the weekend Joe Trippi, a political consultant who ran John Edwards presidential campaign until the former North Carolina senator dropped out just before Super Tuesday, noted that the last two conventions not scripted as a love-fest honoring the nominee were those of the 1976 Republicans and the 1980 Democrats. Both of these parties, like the 1968 Dems before them, lost the November election.
So messiness is bad. It must be avoided at all costs, at least if one wants to win. The problem with this theory is that this year's "messy" Democratic race is energizing voters in ways no one has seen for a generation or more. Obama and Clinton have each gathered more votes than any previous Democratic presidential hopeful. Why? Because despite the best efforts of the party planners, we have a real contest for the nomination, and real contests are exciting.
I have voted in every election since 1984. Over the years I have lived, and voted, in California, Florida, Georgia and my home state of Vermont. Yet last week, in Vermont, I voted for the first time in a presidential primary that meant something. In all six of those previous elections the nominating contest was effectively over by the time it made its way to wherever I was living. Having my vote matter, needless to say, made the entire process mean a lot more.
Which may explain the results of a much-discussed Washington Post-ABC News poll that was released on the day of last week's Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont primaries.
A whopping 67 per cent of Democrats polled said Clinton should stay in the nomination race if she won just one of the large states that voted last week: Texas and Ohio. As it turned out, she won both. Even more telling, however, were the 45 per cent who said she should keep running even if she lost both of those states. It's not a majority, but it is still a pretty big number. This, at a time when the conventional wisdom held that losing either state would doom the New York senator's campaign.
The short term lesson is that instead of wringing their hands Democratic strategists ought to be exulting. The Clinton-Obama race has created excitement where none has existed for decades.
That poll, and last week's vote also, however, contain a warning. All of this excitement is not happening in spite of the long, hard fought nominating contest but because of it. No one likes to lose, but most Americans are willing to concede defeat when they believe their side has been fairly beaten.
Avoiding an ugly political fight on national television come August appears to be the priority right now among party elders. But this pales beside their need to get both sides to acknowledge the eventual outcome — whatever it is — as a fair one, fairly arrived at. Fail this test, and it will not really matter who leads the party ticket into November.
Gordon Robison is a journalist and consultant based in Burlington, Vermont and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has lived in and reported on the Middle East for two decades, including assignments in Baghdad for both CNN and Fox News.