If you’re ever inside the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale and hear laughter ringing through the hallways, it’s probably me visiting the tomb of Culbert Olson.

Olson is perhaps the most anomalous figure in California political history. During our long era of Republican dominance (1896-1958), he was the only Democrat to serve as governor. And he was an unapologetic atheist in our god-crazy country, refusing to say “So help me God” while taking the oath of office in 1939. After an ineffective four-year term and re-election defeat at the hands of Earl Warren, he went on to run United Secularists of America.

In this century, Olson is an unknown, forgotten by all but the kookiest connoisseurs of Californiana, like your columnist, who cracks up every time he encounters our late, great god-denying governor in that cathedral-like mausoleum, just steps from a stained-glass reproduction of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. This state is a bottomless lavabo bowl of contradictions.

Culbert Olson is almost never quoted, much less invoked, by powerful Californians today.

Which is what made Gov. Gavin Newsom’s June 25 State of the State speech shocking for those few of us who know Olson’s story.

Newsom started his speech by invoking Olson’s January 2, 1939 inaugural address—a document that not even I had read previously—and its opening call for California to stand up “in the face of ‘the destruction of democracy.’” Back then, with Europe sliding into war, Olson said:

As we witness destruction of democracy elsewhere in the world, accompanied by denial of civil liberties and inhuman persecutions, under the rule of despots and dictators, so extreme as to shock the moral sense of mankind, it seems appropriate that we Californians, on this occasion, should announce to the world that despotism shall not take root in our State; that the preservation of our American civil liberties and democratic institutions shall be the first duty and firm determination of our government.

Confronted by economic and social crisis, are we going to move forward toward the destiny of true democracy, or slide backward toward the abyss of regimented dictatorship?

Though he only directly quoted one Olson line, Newsom noted that in 2024 we face the same choice. Newsom continued:

The California way of life is under attack. For conservatives and delusional California bashers, their success depends on our failure. They want to impeach the very things that have made us successful, as a tactic to turn America toward a darker future.

Then Newsom pivoted to a more familiar speech, including blasts at Republicans, and long lists of progressive policies.

What Newsom didn’t mention—or, more likely, didn’t know—is that Culbert Olson is a very good model of how not to behave when democracy is under attack. Newsom isn’t an Olson clone. He is Catholic, for starters. But he has enough in common with Olson—each was the most progressive governor of his respective era—that he might reflect on this particular predecessor’s failures.

Olson won the governorship because he had the good fortune to run against the corrupt incumbent Frank Merriam. But his luck ran out there.

In retrospect, Olson appears cursed, almost as if a higher power were punishing him. Four days after Olson gave that inaugural speech, he collapsed, from a heart ailment. Three months later, his wife Kate Olson died at 56. She remains the only California First Lady to die in office.

Olson not only had a massive agenda (including public pensions, universal healthcare, and government takeover of the utilities), he was unusually strident in pursuing it. Like Newsom, he had a taste for public feuds. Where Newsom targets Fox News, Olson battled William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire. Newsom has usually been wise enough to make enemies of non-Californian politicians (like red state governors). But Olson got into local fights that frustrated his agenda, battling Republican and conservative Democratic legislators, and the Catholic archbishops in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Olson, like Newsom, was criticized for pursuing too much. That 1939 inaugural speech resembles a Newsom speech in stating way too many progressive ambitions to accomplish. Olson’s many legislative enemies in both parties blocked almost all of his broad agenda. Newsom, instead, often finds his grand ambitions foiled by mismanagement and a complicated and restrictive state governing system.

Newsom, like Olson, has made warnings about democratic decline a major talking point. What should be sobering for him is Olson’s utter failure to protect liberties and democratic practice.

Notably, when World War II came, the governor failed to defend civil liberties—most obviously, with the incarceration of Californians of Japanese heritage.

Olson knew this was wrong and warned against it publicly. He wrote his confidant President Roosevelt, asking him to defend Japanese Americans as loyal citizens, and lobbied General John DeWitt against forced relocation and incarceration. But when DeWitt imposed the policy, Olson, as governor, stopped fighting and embraced it.

Similarly, Newsom, after years of pursuing pro-immigrant policies, has recently bowed to the political winds and President Biden’s rights-violating restrictions on immigration and asylum seekers, which mirror Trump’s policies.

Olson’s rhetoric about democracy did very little—and ultimately may have caused harm when he didn’t back it up with action. We are learning this lesson again now. When elected officials claim they are defending democracy—as Newsom and Democrats do most loudly—they make democracy look like just another talking point or political issue. When elected officials issue warnings, they spread not hope but fear, and fear is an ally of authoritarians and dictators.

Purity, progressivism, and strong faith (or Olson’s strong lack of faith) are not nearly as convincing as affection and hope. Political rhetoric that taps our fears doesn’t encourage democracy nearly as much as the hard work of building solidarity and compromise with our political opponents.

And nothing is healthier for democracy than ensuring that everyday people have the power to make decisions for themselves. In other words, keeping our democracy is not up to our governors, but to the people.

Heaven help us.

The post Why Is Gavin Newsom Invoking a Failed World War Two-Era Governor? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In our era of one-party rule by complacent Democrats, California might benefit from a coherent and compelling political opposition.

Instead, we keep getting John Cox.

You probably don’t recognize Cox’s name. This goes to the heart of the problem.

Cox, a businessman and former congressional and Republican presidential candidate from Illinois who moved to the San Diego area more than a decade ago, has been the most prominent opponent of ruling Democrats during their 14 years and counting of total political control in the Capitol.

Cox spent millions of dollars running twice against Gov. Gavin Newsom—losing to the governor in 2018’s regularly scheduled election and again in the 2021 recall. Over the past dozen years, Cox has also proposed provocative and attention-grabbing ballot measures, including initiatives to increase the size of the legislature, limit gas taxes, and force elected officials to wear the names of their top donors on their clothing.

None of Cox’s initiatives passed. And he made no lasting impact on political debate, much less the actual governance of this state.

He recently wrote a book that, mostly unintentionally, demonstrates why.

The Newsom Nightmare: The California Catastrophe and How to Reform Our Broken System, published late last year, pulls back the curtain to offer some insider takes on California politics. Cox details, for example, how talk show host Larry Elder’s entry into the 2021 recall race, with the support of the politically toxic Donald Trump, hurt any chance of a Newsom recall passing by allowing the governor “to make Elder, along with the former president, the face of the recall and shift the debate from Newsom’s failures.”

Cox recounts scandals over regulating the utility PG&E, which the state bailed out even after it killed people in fires and a gas explosion. And he offers vignettes of California small businesspeople and mid-level officials frustrated by the overregulation and official secrecy of a state that is great at many things—but not governance.

But like so much of the political conversation in our state, Cox’s book doesn’t add up to very much. Cox offers no future-focused opposition narrative that would pressure Democrats to improve their performance or create public demand to cast them out of office.

Maddeningly, Cox clearly understands the perils of an absent opposition. “Having a single-party supermajority govern every branch of government throws the checks and balances crucial to representative democracy off kilter. It renders democracy impotent,” he writes.

And he correctly points out structural problems in the governing system that give power to rich and powerful people and interest groups. He shows how California legislative districts are so big—by far the most populous of any in the U.S.—that every lawmaker must raise millions to run for office. He details a “pay to play” campaign finance system that allows businesses, unions, and rich people with state contracts to give money to the very same lawmakers who make financial decisions. And he recounts how the outsized power of donors prevents Californians from turning their grand ambitions and good intentions for better education, health care, and housing into reality.

“The key to solving these problems,” he writes, “is to fashion solutions that reflect good practice and policy, forged by intelligent and well-thought-out tradeoffs, that have the effect of helping the vast majority of our people rather than favoring a narrow interest or group.”

But you’ll read in vain for a detailed Cox proposal full of well-thought-out tradeoffs or compromises on major issues. And that’s not the only contradiction in the book. Cox rightly bemoans the politics of personal attacks—personality and cultural wars distract us from deeper problems. Yet he still chose The Newsom Nightmare as his title.

The bigger problem is that Cox can’t elucidate what a California opposition could stand for. His book is all over the place—there’s Ronald Reagan nostalgia, blasts at local bureaucracy, contradictory calls both for tougher regulation and lighter regulation of business, and a bunch of word salad about immigration that might only make sense to frequent Fox News viewers.

There’s also a confusing ending about the national peril of what Cox calls “Californication,” which seems to be about many things but does not have anything to do with an old David Duchovny series about sex in our state.

Cox does draw some blood when he writes about the abusive tactics of trial lawyers and the distorting power of the state’s public employee unions, which saddle government budgets with unsustainable pensions. But he never offers a clear solution to the tricky question of how to take away benefits that are legally guaranteed.

He also takes a few swipes at his own party but doesn’t explain how someone might bring Republicans back to relevance in California.

Cox’s failures of coherence wouldn’t be worth mentioning, except that there is another gubernatorial election scheduled for 2026. And already, a half-dozen Democratic politicians—all with long experience in politics and little record of governing success—appear to be running for the office.

There is, as of yet, no clear opponent to these insider Democrats. And there is no one offering a clear prescription for how to change California’s structure so that people in our progressive state finally get the progressive solutions they’ve been promised—higher wages, high-quality healthcare, stronger schools, and affordable housing.

Perhaps someone will step forward to provide real opposition and offer a compelling vision for how to fix the state’s broken governing system and deliver more and better services.

Or perhaps Californians who want a change will be stuck with someone like John Cox, again.

The post California Democrats Need Real Opposition appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the big takeaway from an August 10th Zócalo panel discussion at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo district. Titled “Is the Republican Party Dead?” the conversation amounted to a kind of autopsy not only of the GOP, but also of the American two-party system as a whole.

“I think you’re seeing the lug nuts come off and the wheels are starting to rattle,” said panelist Mike Madrid, a political consultant at the Sacramento-based public affairs firm GrassrootsLab, who previously served as the political director for the California Republican Party.

Madrid’s dire assessment of the donkey-elephant dyad that has dominated American politics since the Civil War was largely shared by his fellow panelists: Cassandra Pye, a public affairs strategist who was the deputy chief of staff to former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; and Leslie Graves, publisher of Ballotpedia, the Encyclopedia of American Politics.

The panelists concurred that American voters increasingly define their politics by what they’re against, not what they’re for; by the politicians they hate, rather than the politicians they admire; by the party they revile rather than the one they identify with.

If American voters are united in anything these days, it’s in their bipartisan contempt for both major parties, along with most major institutions, the panelists suggested. For many voters, as for many politicians and their cheerleaders in the increasingly partisan and echo-chambered mass media, winning simply means that the other team loses, as if politics had no higher stakes—and no more broadly shared idea of a greater public good—than a Giants-Dodgers double-header.

“You could say the [Republican] party is in the most trouble—except for the other one,” Graves said.

When moderator Christina Bellantoni, assistant managing editor, politics, at the Los Angeles Times, asked the panelists how they would sum up what the Republican Party stands for to space aliens landing on Earth, Graves responded: “It’s that they’re not Democrats.”

Bellantoni was the first to mention Donald Trump, and the discussion turned to the furiously anti-establishment, drain-the-swamp sales pitches that won him the White House. The panelists agreed that the anger that propelled Trump to the presidency went deeper than mere disgust with Washington’s legislative dysfunction. The nation is suffering from a deeper malaise, the panelists said, because many Americans feel that the political system has failed them, and that neither of the two major parties is going to be able to solve the problems of stagnant wages, rising homelessness, and other challenges that voters experience in their daily lives.

While the media obsesses over “culture war” issues, voters are preoccupied with what Pye called “real-people stuff”—the fear of not being able to attain better lives than their parents, for example, and the lingering ripple effects of the Great Recession.

“We’re at a time when both parties are dealing with very serious cleavages in their base,” Madrid said. “The populist dynamic that is driving both parties is really across the spectrum.” For the Republicans, those fissures resulted in the multi-candidate “clown car” of the 2016 Republican Party primary season, Madrid said.

If the national picture for both major parties is jumbled and increasingly bleak, the picture for Republicans in California at the state, local, and federal level is as poor as it is for Democrats across large swathes of the Deep South and the Great Plains.

“One has got the impression that there is at least a nail or two in the coffin in California” of the Republican Party, Pye said. For a California Republican to have a viable chance of winning a statewide office, she added, “It’ll take a great candidate, it’ll take a lot of cash, it’ll take some good timing, and a little bit of luck.”

But Madrid said that recent low turnout in California shows that, although many voters know they really dislike the Republicans, they’re not strongly motivated to show up at the polls to back Democrats.

And Graves pointed out that, although it’s conventional wisdom that voters are clamoring for change, congressional incumbents keep getting re-elected in droves, and have huge advantages over first-time challengers.

In that same vein of reasoning, Graves questioned the idea that Trump is going to drag down California’s seven most vulnerable Republican Congress members, who’ve been targeted by Democrats for 2018. After all, she pointed out, those Republicans did manage to win in 2016 with Trump at the top of the ticket, even in congressional districts that went for Hillary Clinton.

Madrid said that when he first became active in politics, the Republicans were the party of rich old white people. “That party is now the Democratic Party,” Madrid said. “The Republican Party is now the party of poor white people,” who now regard themselves as an oppressed minority in need of protection. But while economic issues remain paramount, appealing to racial hatred is not a good—or effective—strategy for the GOP, panelists agreed. Pye said she thinks that one reason Trump’s approval rating is so low is that he repeatedly has flirted with white nationalists.

When the evening opened up to the audience Q & A, a Green Party supporter asked why there isn’t more discussion about backing measures that would dismantle the “winner-take-all” system that favors the major parties and stifles third-party alternatives. Graves said proposals for such measures may get onto a few state ballots next year, but such a serious shake-up to the status quo won’t happen overnight.

Another audience member asked how the major parties could be restored, and kept from being hijacked by the extremes of right and left.

“I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is that the system doesn’t work for a rapidly growing segment of our society,” Madrid replied. It was a disquieting conclusion to an evening that offered little cause for optimism for Republicans—or their main rivals.

The post The Two-Party System Is Not Working—and Not Going Anywhere appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Such predictability was not always the case. In fact, three-quarters of a century ago, the City of Brotherly Love played host to a very different convention—one whose outcome was so unexpected it became known as the “Miracle in Philadelphia.”

This was before the age of modern primaries, when the convention was less of an award ceremony, and more the actual contest. When the 1940 Republican National Convention opened, just 300 of the 1,000 delegates were pledged to a candidate. The contenders included such heavyweights as former President Herbert Hoover (attempting a comeback), Manhattan district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, the governor of South Dakota, and three U.S. senators, among them Michigan’s Arthur H. Vandenberg and Ohio’s Robert A. Taft.

And then there was Wendell L. Willkie, the boisterous head of the New York City-based Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, the nation’s largest energy holding company. Willkie’s previous foray into the political realm was as a delegate at the 1924 and 1932 National Conventions—as a Democrat.

But when President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the Tennessee Valley Authority to compete with private utilities, Willkie soured on the Democrats and became a leading spokesman for the business sector against New Deal policies. Willkie nonetheless described himself as a “liberal” with an ironclad commitment to civil rights and individual liberties. He said that if elected he planned to desegregate the government, the armed forces, and Washington, D.C.

Still, it was quite a leap to go from Democratic National Convention delegate to Republican presidential candidate. Willkie had not even bothered to mount a formal campaign, having declared his “availability” for nomination just 48 days before the convention’s first gavel fell. He had no campaign funds and no campaign manager or hired spokesman. A Gallup poll six weeks prior to the convention reflected Willkie’s minimal efforts, showing 67 percent support among Republican voters for Dewey, 14 percent for Vandenberg, 12 percent for Taft, and 3 percent for Willkie.

Yet it was Willkie who, to the astonishment of everyone except himself, somehow managed to walk away with the nomination. How did an industrialist from Indiana—sometimes known as the “Barefoot Wall Street Lawyer” for the folksy Indiana ways he brought to the big city—manage to best his far better-known, better-connected and better-moneyed rivals?

The answer is both simple and complex. Only a month earlier, Hitler’s Nazi troops had stormed through Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and France. More than 350,000 British and French troops, in full retreat, had staged a daring escape across the English Channel from Dunkirk. On the first evening of the convention, at a special session at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall broadcast via radio coast to coast, Republican National Chairman John Hamilton of Kansas addressed the country’s mounting fears. “The world is witnessing a terrible demonstration of how quickly the hard-earned rights of man can be destroyed,” Hamilton declared. “Individual liberty and opportunity are gone in much of the world; the rights of man, slowly built up over a thousand years, have vanished.” His speech concluded with a descendent of Benjamin Franklin ringing the Liberty Bell.

For the 1940 Republican presidential hopefuls, this state of affairs created a problem. All of the leading candidates were well-known isolationists, while Roosevelt, who was seeking an unprecedented third term, had been engaged globally for almost two terms. Indeed, the official Republican platform issued that week declared the party “firmly opposed to involving this nation in foreign war.” But it added, “The zero hour is here. America must prepare if it wants to defend our shores, our homes, our lives, and our most cherished ideals.”

Taft, son of President William Howard Taft, was the conservative leader of the U.S. Senate and the Republican establishment’s pick. Vandenberg, a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was leader of the Senate’s isolationist block and an early frontrunner, subsequently knocked out by Dewey in the primaries. Dewey, the impeccably dressed, 38-year-old, gang-busting U.S. Attorney had narrowly lost the New York governor’s race in 1938. But he won nine out of 10 presidential primaries and came to the convention as the strong favorite.

Willkie, 48, was the sole internationalist—and the only contender with experience running a large organization. In 1929 he was hired as corporate counsel at Commonwealth & Southern and quickly rose through the ranks. Four years later, in the midst of the Great Depression and with the company on the verge of bankruptcy, he was made president. Willkie rebuilt the company, increasing business assets to more than $1 billion, employing 25,000 workers and bringing electricity for the first time to millions of people in 10 states.

In the run-up to the convention, as global tensions mounted, Willkie captured the imagination of the public and the media. U.S. News, Time, Life, Look, Fortune, and The Saturday Evening Post ran feature stories, and 10,000 “Willkie for President” clubs sprang up across the nation. By convention week, a Gallup poll suggested that Willkie had carved a big chunk out of Dewey’s lead. Dewey was still far ahead, at 47 percent. But Willkie was now in second position, at 29 percent, with the other contenders relegated to single digits.

As was the norm—before convention rule changes that went into effect in 1972—most delegates of both parties were either uncommitted or committed to a “Favorite Son” candidate from their state. All the 1940 candidates thought that if they could hold off Dewey on the first ballot they had a chance. But Willkie had momentum. During the convention, the Willkie for President clubs inundated the convention with more than a million pro-Willkie telegrams and letters, which were dumped at the delegates’ feet, while the balconies were stacked with supporters screaming, “We want Willkie! We want Willkie!”

Where did such enthusiastic support come from for this non-establishment candidate? Initially the clubs did emerge from the establishment, spurred by Republican strategist and Willkie supporter Oren Root. But that was just the beginning. The clubs—fueled by the barrage of national publicity and Willkie’s homespun personality—resonated with the public and spread rapidly and spontaneously across the nation, culminating in this moment of frenzied support.

On the first ballot, Dewey took the lead, with 360 of the 501 votes required to win. Taft, known as “Mr. Republican” and favored by uncommitted party-insider delegates, trailed with 189 votes, while Willkie started in third place with 105. But Dewey made a tactical error in not holding reserve votes for the second ballot, which would have helped create the impression of momentum. Instead he dropped to 338 while both Taft and Willkie gained ground. By the end of the fourth ballot Dewey’s support had collapsed to 250. Taft gained momentum with 254, while Willkie surged forward with 306. The relentless chanting from the balcony continued: “We want Willkie! We want Willkie!”

On the crucial sixth ballot, state delegations stampeded to Willkie. The darkest dark horse since the days of Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield won the prize. Afterwards in his small hotel room, the nominee laughingly told the press, “I guess the first thing I’ll have to do is change my registration from Democrat to Republican.”

George Gallup called Willkie’s charge to the nomination “the most astonishing” in the brief history of polling. Journalist H.L. Mencken wrote, “I am convinced that the nomination of Willkie was managed by the Holy Ghost in person.”

The campaign was almost as exciting. Roosevelt later said that despite his victory—amassing 27 million votes to Willkie’s 22 million, the most secured by any Republican presidential candidate to date—the “liberal” Republican known for carrying his own bags hit him with the toughest fight of his political career. Roosevelt so respected Willkie that soon after his inauguration he sent his former political foe traveling throughout Europe and Asia as his personal diplomatic representative during World War II. Willkie’s resulting book, One World, was a bestseller. In 1944, Willkie briefly mounted a fresh campaign for president, but dropped out after he was defeated by party conservatives in the Wisconsin primary. He died soon after, at age 52, from a series of heart attacks.

Though Willkie never realized his presidential dream, his spectacular performance at the 1940 convention stands as one of the all-time greatest presidential convention upsets. And Willkie’s strong showing against FDR in the general election ensured him—and his ideas—a seat at the table. In 2016, when many American voters across the ideological spectrum have again demonstrated their frustrations with the limitations of political insiders, history reminds us that our democratic institutions can, indeed, accommodate the demands of sudden popular change.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post Before Donald Trump, Wendell L. Willkie Upended the GOP Primary in 1940 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Men and women are drawn into politics for a combination of motives,” he writes. “These include power, glory, zeal for contention or success, duty, hate, oblivion, hero worship, curiosity, and enjoyment of the work.”

I ran for California Secretary of State last year for an even simpler reason: I knew the office was underperforming, and I believed my work and scholarship made me uniquely qualified to fix it.

My decision to run for office was at once logical—and unreasonable.

As a Republican living in Santa Monica, I knew I was a political minority. But I wasn’t prepared for how, as a first-time candidate with limited funds, I would occupy such a tiny planet on the fringes of California’s political universe. How I got from those outer reaches to a spot near the sun is a story of good fortune and hard work (mine and other people’s). The challenges I faced speak to some structural issues in California politics. But ironically, those same issues made it possible for a political “outsider” like me to run in the first place.

A campaign that ended with my earning more votes than any other Republican in California began quietly at a dining room table in Santa Monica. This is how my wife and I make life-changing decisions—like when I decided to leave the private sector to pursue a master’s degree in public policy at Pepperdine. And when, after graduation, one of my professors asked me to head up Common Sense California, a multi-partisan non-profit focused on improving civic participation.

In this capacity, I met our then-secretary of state and also got to know others from across the U.S. These encounters confirmed that people in these positions have a tremendous opportunity to encourage civic engagement and participation at the state level. But I also learned that the California office was doing very little in this regard.

In To Be a Politician, Bullitt cites 19th-century writer James Fenimore Cooper, “whose reading a worthless novel provoked him to quit his work and write a good one.”

My observations of the secretary of state’s office led to a decision along a similar line of reasoning. I never knew that I would win, but always believed that I should.
Looking back, I can say that while ignorance may not be bliss, it can help you make hard decisions. Sometimes exactly the hard decisions you should make.

I was a political outsider without great personal wealth up against an opponent I knew would outspend me (in the end, by 8 to 1). But a decade of sales experience had prepared me to sit in my car or at a dining room table with a laptop and a phone for several hours each day “dialing for dollars.”

Of course, it takes more than making the daily commitment to calling to be successful; I had to persuade perfect strangers to invest in me. As a first-time candidate running for secretary of state as a Republican, this demanded my getting over three hurdles: first, convince the person on the other end of the line that there was a real person named “Pete Peterson” (not always easy), second, convince that same person there is an office named “secretary of state” and, finally that, as a Republican, I really had a chance to win statewide office.

Whether on the phone, or at fundraising events, or through email solicitations, all of these hurdles had to be jumped. In each of these channels, when I was able to make it over the first, I frequently stumbled over the second and third. I remember speaking at a fundraising gathering in Solvang about the importance of the secretary of state’s office, only to be upbraided by one of the guests, “Yes, yes, but as a possible secretary, I want to know your opinion on the Arab-Israeli conflict.” This challenge to defining the office and why people should be interested was illustrated by a Pew Research survey published last October, which showed that only 4 percent of Californians could accurately describe what the office does.

But the Republican hurdle was the highest one to cross. Years of defeat had generated a completely understandable malaise on the part of regular donors. Yes, many gave to Republicans outside of California, or to more local legislative or Congressional races, but the thought of a Republican winning statewide in the Golden State appeared as a bridge too far. One major Republican donor offered this during one of my calls: “I’ll write you a small check, but it might be bad luck, since the last four statewide Republicans I’ve given to all lost.” In the end, I made it five in a row.

Still, those who make running for office a career—no matter the party label—see the race course in a more favorable way. My (late) friend Bill Hauck, a longtime fixture in the state’s political, business, and educational circles, warned me about this in 2012. As I outlined my reasons for running, my vision for a transformed secretary of state’s office, and my cursory thoughts on how victory might be achievable, he listened with a bemused grin. “You see that building behind you, Pete?,” he asked, gesturing to the Capitol dome outside his office window. “You know, for most of the folks in there, this is the best job they’ll ever have, and they’ll do anything they can to hold on to it.”

The person who starts on the school board with a plan to become governor has a very different way of thinking about his or her life. A career politician like my opponent can build relationships with donors over many elections, with everyone secure in the knowledge that he’d be there in the future—and probably in an office with even greater influence. There’s also a practical advantage. As a career politician, my opponent could transfer funds from his previous campaigns into the statewide race.

Also favoring the insider—particularly in California—is the substantial presence of the “third house”—a vast network of associations, corporations, and unions with lobbying interests in Sacramento. Most Californians have never heard of the California Infill Builders Federation PAC, the Technet California Political Action Committee, or the California Refuse Recycling Council North PAC, but these groups (and dozens more) contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to my opponent.

Why are these organizations interested in the secretary of state’s race? Viewed in the best light, these contributions come through standing relationships. In many ways, this is the primary skill of a successful career politician—an ability to make particular kinds of political relationships, aligning personal positions on issues with the financial benefits of voting on them.

My opponent had built these relationships over eight years in Sacramento as a state senator and the preceding seven years as a Los Angeles city councilman—on issues ranging from plastic bag bans to telecom legislation. A quick check of donations to his secretary of state campaign reveals financial support from groups ranging from the California Grocers Association to AT&T. (With all the talk these days about “outside money” in politics, the only independent expenditure in my race was a $170,000 project in support of my opponent, initiated by the California Labor Federation—yet another third house organization.)

This fundraising avenue is almost completely shut off for outsiders. It’s not that I didn’t try. Several times I was told by third house leaders I met with that I presented an “interesting campaign,” but because the organization “had a piece of legislation before my opponent’s committee the next day,” they could not be seen supporting my run with a donation.

I hoped some groups might open their wallets when my opponent termed out of office after the close of the legislative term in August. But then my staff and I were informed, “Your opponent has a lot of friends who are not terming out. If we support you, we lose the support of those friends.”

Ah, relationships.

In the last couple months of the campaign, we ran an analysis from the publicly available data of our respective fundraising efforts, and found that while I had raised about 80 percent of our funds from individuals with the remainder from organizations and companies, my opponent had almost an inverse composition: 75 percent from third house groups and unions, and the balance from individuals. Using that data, we created one of the campaign’s more popular infographics. Ironically, we only had sufficient funds to post it to our campaign Facebook page, and send it out via Twitter and email.

I’ve worked on various political reform measures over the last decade, but here I saw how ineffective fundraising reforms have been when it comes to leveling the playing field for first-time candidates. In a recent study, the bipartisan reform organization California Forward—on whose Leadership Council I serve—found that “the most critical deficiency in the state’s existing system is not a lack of data or the legal requirements for disclosure, but a lack of ready access to this information.”

I think it would be helpful for Californians if, for example, when the press cites campaign fundraising totals, those figures were clarified with the inclusion of the percentage that comes from individuals relative to organizational and corporate contributors.

Political insiders also benefit from party relationships. While many of California’s recent reform movements have sought to weaken party influence, the 2014 primary for the secretary of state’s race demonstrated how important party affiliation remains as a signal to voters.

In this election, a well-regarded former Republican, Dan Schnur, ran as an Independent. Dan maintained a deep network of relationships—both political and donor—with what could be called the “institutional” Republican base. Which is why, when Dan entered the race about six months after my campaign launch, I quipped, “I’m not the best known Republican in the race, but I am the only Republican.”

Dan’s presence posed one of my biggest challenges. I had to figure out how to benefit from my party label and organization, even though I lacked established relationships with the Republican donor community. I saw local party-affiliated groups as channels for civic participation, and met with as many as I could. I gave dozens of speeches to Republican women’s groups, county central committees, Lincoln Clubs, and conservative groups.

I am convinced that the work of so many of these groups and committed volunteers—emails to friends, door knocking, and phone calls—played a significant role in how well we performed on Election Day in spite of the significant fundraising disparity. In the primary, with multiple candidates on the ballot, I won the second largest number of votes—with that “R” by my name—narrowly behind the leading Democrat, and so I advanced to the general election. Dan, who ran a strong campaign but didn’t have the “R” next to his name, finished a distant fourth behind three party-affiliated candidates, including Leland Yee, the indicted state senator who had already withdrawn from the race.

Despite this triumph, I struggled to turn my party affiliation into money. Many people—especially Republicans at the grassroots level—are surprised now to learn that the State Party gave no direct financial support to my campaign.

In one sense, this made sense. About two years prior to Election Day, senior party leaders decided to restrict their financial support to state legislative races in the 2014 election cycle. Given the fact that the California GOP had won only two statewide races in the preceding eight years, they figured I didn’t have much of a chance. So they wouldn’t be giving money to me—or any other statewide candidate. Of course, by publicizing this funding strategy—as the party chairman did in speeches to party faithful—he made it even more difficult for those of us running for statewide office to raise money. A couple prospective Republican donors asked me, “If you could just get leadership to say some encouraging things about your campaign, I think wallets would open up,” but I wasn’t able to get that support.

It felt strange. Here I was, a Republican since I was old enough to vote, putting forth a positive, reform-focused Republican message that fit the job for which I was running. And party leaders would barely talk to me. There also wasn’t much transparency in how decisions were made about supporting candidates. This opacity and lack of support were particularly frustrating to my family and friends—most of whom had contributed to my campaign. A few friends—especially Democrat friends—told me: “This is why people hate politics!”

On the positive side, the best part of running was the opportunity to travel the state and meet people. That may sound like political cliché, but it’s true in California.
My mind flashes back to an evening speech I gave at a rally in Del Norte County— in the far northwest corner of California—where a farming family opened their poultry barn to an overflow gathering of 200 people. Other memories include dropping the green flag at an off-road racing event in Lake Elsinore after addressing a crowd of several thousand, and being introduced to a large African-American church in Los Angeles, then having lunch with the senior pastor.

I think back to my experience speaking to smaller gatherings—at a couple’s beautiful home in Solvang, an incredible apartment in San Francisco, a Portuguese restaurant in Bakersfield, and a diner in Carlsbad. I rode a float with a gigantic mechanical GOP elephant through the streets of Valley Center during their Western Days celebration. And I rode in the back of a truck with a woman dressed up as the Statue of Liberty through the streets of Westchester for their July 4th parade.

Working as I do at a public policy school, I’m familiar with the term “selection bias.” I understand that most of these events attracted Californians who were already interested in politics and policy. But it was encouraging to meet so many people practicing the hard work of citizenship, whether walking precincts in San Diego or making phone calls in Torrance.

I was also encouraged by the favorable press coverage of my campaign. It has become a trope for Republican candidates to complain about “the mainstream media,” but I don’t have a single complaint about editorial boards or political reporters.

I earned endorsements from 14 of the top 15 newspapers in California, but the one I will remember most fondly was from the alternative city newspaper, San Diego CityBeat. In their endorsements issue, I was the only Republican to earn their nod. Writing that originally, “we didn’t want a Republican anywhere near the office of Secretary of State, because it oversees elections in California,” the editors concluded, “Peterson backs it [support for public engagement] with his résumé: He’s dedicated his career to increasing public participation in civic affairs.”

Of course, I had the advantage of offering a message that came from my previous work and had appeal beyond my party. I talked about my work on civic engagement, and how we need a 21st century reform movement that uses technology to better inform the public. I also argued that, because of our unprecedented fiscal obligations, the secretary of state should engage the public in difficult discussions about trade-offs and obligations. My message was about a renewed understanding of the vast responsibilities of citizenship. It was not a message of complaint about government or specific politicians, but one that embraces government as an essential institution currently on an unsustainable course.

My outsider status as a Republican running for statewide office in California gave me an opening in the race, but it also served as the foundation for my defeat. In the fall, after an hour-long inquisition by an editorial board at one of California’s largest newspapers, one reporter told me, “I think you did very well here this afternoon, it’s just too bad you’re going to have that ‘R’ next to your name on the ballot.” I agreed to a point, but responded that being a member of the minority party provided a political first-timer like me an opportunity to run for statewide office. I added: “If I were a Democrat, there’s no way a candidate from outside the ‘system’ would get anywhere near the secretary of state’s office.”

You take the good with the bad. On Election Night, I led in earlier returns, but lost the lead around 3 a.m., when votes came in from Democrat-rich Los Angeles and Alameda counties. Interestingly, the final seven point-margin, or about 500,000 votes, could be found in those two counties alone.

In his preface to To Be a Politician, Stimson Bullitt describes the decision to run for political office as “a calling,” one in which a candidate “can aspire to a better scheme of things, a scheme that can be brought to pass with a politician’s help.”

I learned many things on the campaign trail, but my most significant gain was a deep respect for those who make the choice to enter the arena in the first place—never knowing if they will win, but knowing they should.

The post An Outsider’s Guide to Running—and Losing—a California Election appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Indeed the power of Goldwater’s words figured prominently in his 1998 New York Times obituary, which described him as “recklessly candid”—a five-term U.S. Senator who “rarely engaged in understatement,” whether decrying the impact of the New Deal or championing the Constitution, state’s rights, or business interests.

Goldwater’s brand of libertarianism defined Arizona conservatism in the middle of the 20th century and is credited with sparking the resurgence of the American right in the 1960s. But what role does it play in the state and country today?

In advance of the Zócalo/Arizona State University event, “Is Goldwater Libertarianism Dead?”, we asked scholars and thinkers: If Barry Goldwater were alive today, what would he claim as his greatest legacy?

The post What Did Barry Goldwater Leave Us? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We’ll be able to see the evidence of this dysfunction as soon as the 2012 election results come in, said Edwards, a former Oklahoma Republican congressman and author of The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans. If Barack Obama wins and nominates a new Supreme Court justice, regardless of that person’s qualifications, experience, and record, every single Democrat will be for him or her—and every Republican will be against. If Mitt Romney wins, we’ll see the opposite happen.

This is the way the Congress and Senate work on every single issue. Edwards likened the adversarial nature of party politics to the NFL: if one team is for it, the other team must be against it. So how did this happen?

“Incentives work,” said Edwards. “What you reward you get more of; what you punish you get less of, and we have created a political system in this country that rewards incivility, that rewards intransigence, that rewards the refusal to compromise.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The U.S. government was founded on the belief that Americans should be citizens, not subjects, with power vested in the people to make decisions on everything from taxes to going to war. But the Congress that makes those decisions isn’t reflecting the wishes of the American people, said Edwards: “The people in Washington, I don’t know what they’re listening to, but it ain’t us.”

The problem is the party system—which is not what the founders intended. According to Edwards, the first four U.S. presidents agreed on just one thing: “Do not create political parties.” The permanent factions that we have today would be anathema to Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison.

The current state primary system, with its closed primaries and “sore loser laws” (in 46 states, if you run for a party’s nomination in a convention or primary and lose, you can’t be on the election day ballot), rewards candidates to the far right or far left. A candidate like Todd Akin in Missouri—a state with a population of 6 million—becomes one of just two choices on a ballot because he received 200,000 votes in a closed primary.

In everything else in our lives, we have a multitude of choices. But when it comes to choosing the people who make enormous decisions that will affect the entire nation, we allow “two private, power-seeking clubs” to limit ourselves to two choices, said Edwards.

Those clubs also manipulate voters’ choices in more insidious ways, like redistricting. In many states, the majority in the state legislature decides how to draw congressional district lines, putting their own interests ahead of geography and good representation. Edwards, a Republican, was originally elected to Congress in a heavily Democratic Oklahoma City district. “It drove the Democrats who ran the legislature crazy,” he said. They redrew district lines for the next election so that Edwards—a self-described “city guy”—would be representing a more rural, heavily Republican area of the state, helping Democratic candidates in nearby districts stay safer. “The wheat farmers and small-town ranchers and cattle merchants got screwed,” said Edwards—they weren’t being represented by someone who could articulate their concerns and interests.

Once in Congress, elected officials make sure the partisanship continues. On the House floor, there are two lecterns—one for the Democrats in front of the Democrats, one for the Republicans in front of the Republicans. The first time he addressed the House, Edwards tried to use the Democrats’ lectern in order to make an appeal to the other side. The entire room gasped—and asked him to go back to the Republican lectern. Congress even has two cloakrooms—where people eat or make phone calls—divided by party. “If you walk into the wrong one, it’s like you stumbled into a tryst,” said Edwards. “We’ve set it up to be constant war.”

Yet he doesn’t think the problem is the parties themselves. Rather, said Edwards, it’s that we’ve surrendered control of the system to them.

Edwards believes that change is coming. Forty percent of American voters call themselves Independents. He thinks the new open primary system in Washington state and California will also give voters more choices. More radically, he said that changing campaign finance by restricting contributions to living human beings—meaning no donations from labor unions, political action committees, corporations, or political parties—could be a part of a solution as well.

In the question-and-answer session, Edwards was asked how the American people might compel politicians to cultivate civility.

He said that voters need to punish politicians for negative ads. Tell a politician that he or she has lost your vote as a result of an ad. “They’re afraid of you,” he said. “They’re afraid of the voters.” By punishing bad behavior like nasty campaigns—and rewarding civility—we can get good behavior from our politicians.

Buy the Book: Skylight Books, Amazon, Powell’s.

The post Republicans and Democrats, Get Lost appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Truth is, I wasn’t invited. I’m a Republican by registration and a political strategist by profession, but it’s been years since I worried about becoming a delegate, joining the right mailing list, or taking sides in an intra-party skirmish. If you’re not completely controllable, don’t expect an invitation.

Not that I’d accept it.

I grew up in a politically aware Mexican-American family in Ventura County. My parents were Democrats, but, as I grew older, I started to wonder why they weren’t Republicans. They believed in private charity, self-reliance, and social responsibility. They rejected identity politics. I was conservative, but they were even more conservative. So I took the leap for them and became a Republican. (They joined me some years later.)

In the 1990s, I studied international politics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and wrote my thesis on Latino voters. Very few people had grasped the implications of the demographic changes that were afoot, and I argued that the increase in Latino voters would have a major impact on our politics.

By 2000, this had become self-evidently true, and I was excited to see the Republican nominee, George W. Bush, make such an effort to open the doors of the GOP to Hispanic Americans. By this time, I had become active in Republican politics, and, at age 26, I had become the political director of the California Republican Party. In the summer of 2000, I made my way to Philadelphia to attend the GOP convention, my first.

Conventions are massive productions, and when a city the size of Philadelphia is taken over by tens of thousands of politically engaged Americans it’s an awesome spectacle. Not even sporting events can match the intensity of feeling in the air.

One of the best political speeches I’ve ever heard was given by Dick Cheney–yes, Dick Cheney. It’s hard to give a bad convention speech when everybody in the stands is wearing your jersey.

It was fun to see every major Republican wandering about in one place or another. If Washington is Hollywood for ugly people, then party conventions are the Oscars for ugly people. George W. Bush accepted the 2000 nomination in front of a growing party–and a united one. Americans, too, were more united then.

Then 9/11 happened. Although we were united in fear of other people, the country became divided. Our divisions dried in cement. We couldn’t even get along in wartime. My efforts to bring Latinos into the GOP fold came to naught as the immigration debate got uglier and uglier.

I’ve stayed in politics, and I’ve remained a Republican. (No, I’m not one of those disaffected Republicans publicly pouting about the direction of the party. Everything about the current group in the White House reminds me of why I became a Republican in the first place.) But I haven’t attended a convention since Philadelphia. The year 2000 was the last time both parties were seriously attempting to reach beyond their electoral base. It was also the last year we had a large swath of undecided voters.

Today, our politics are as ugly as I’ve ever seen. I see our commander-in-chief–the man overseeing a war in Afghanistan–suggesting Republicans have launched a war on women. I see an ad campaign suggesting Mitt Romney killed someone as a result of his business practices at Bain Capital. I see Hank Williams Jr. telling a cheering crowd, “We’ve got a Muslim president who hates farming, hates the military, hates the U.S., and we hate him!” Every Chick-fil-A is a battleground in a bigger war of us against ourselves.

Campaigns are stoking this sort of rhetoric because undecided voters have left the building. According to one recent poll, they make up around 3 percent of the electorate. Swing voters won’t swing the outcome anymore. That means national conventions aren’t about persuading people in the middle; they’re about riling up the base. As if the country needs more of that.

Of course, national conventions haven’t decided anything of substance for generations. But they were important as infomercials. Because they were targeted at the flexible middle, which used to be at about 20 percent, nearly all Americans felt they should at least tune in (or pretend to tune in–no longer an option with the major TV networks declining to cover most of the convention). Conventions marked a time to start forming an opinion on where we were going to go next as a nation. Today, no one’s changing his mind about these things.

So, given all this, why would I want to go? What possible positive role can the speeches and cheering in Tampa play as the 2012 races reach the home stretch? I’m still a political strategist and activist, but I don’t work for candidates anymore. I prefer ballot initiatives and other campaigns that allow me to choose my issues and try to persuade people according to specific merits rather than team loyalty. I’ll be rooting for Mitt Romney this week, but I’ll be thousands of miles away.

These days, a lot of Republicans believe the end is nigh because we’ve invited the wrath of God, while a lot of Democrats believe the end is nigh because the globe is going to melt. Everyone would rather be right about how the world’s going to end than work together with the other side to try to save it. Is that our future? I hope not. I hope the level heads come back. I hope we’ll regain some civility in our debates and our politics. If so, you might even see me on the convention floor.

Mike Madrid is a Republican political consultant and a nationally recognized expert on Latino voting trends.

*Photo courtesy of NewsHour.

The post Have Fun Without Me, Tampa appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But the Goldwater whose name pervades the state–U.S. Senator, 1964 presidential candidate, and conservative icon, Barry M. Goldwater–would not have existed without another Goldwater, his uncle: Morris Goldwater. In fact, Morris Goldwater’s constitutional and familial legacy has probably had a larger impact on Arizona’s politics than that of any adult living in the state at its founding in 1912, with the possible exception of Governor George Hunt. But where Hunt left a legacy of partisanship, Morris and Barry’s relationship exemplifies a cross-partisan civility that has become rare.

Morris Goldwater was born in London, England on January 6, 1852, the son of Polish Jews who would soon immigrate to the United States. He arrived in San Francisco in 1854, spent some time at a Catholic school in Los Angeles, and was trained for the family mercantile business. But, like Barry after him, Morris prized the open wilderness over the bustling city.

Morris first arrived in Arizona in 1867, eventually settling in Prescott, where he opened M. Goldwater & Bros., a mercantile store, and became a major player in the economic and political life of Prescott and the state. He helped bring the railroad to his town and joined with partners to launch a bank, becoming its vice president. He was only 27 when first elected to serve as mayor of the territorial seat in 1879. In 1910, Morris won election to the state Constitutional Convention, where he served as Vice President and became the linchpin of the Democratic caucus. He led a group known as the Goldwater Democrats: a handful of moderate convention delegates that voted as a block, carrying the balance of power between progressives and conservatives.

Morris Goldwater’s most significant contribution to the new state constitution was the creation of the Corporation Commission. This powerful three-member elective body combined legislative, judicial, and executive authority over public service corporations such as public utilities. The Corporation Commission occupied–and still occupies–a tricky place where numerous interests must be balanced: labor, capital, government, and customers, among others. Morris’ moderating sensibilities were crucial in devising it

Equally significant was the political legacy Morris passed on to his nephew, Barry Morris Goldwater. Barry spoke of Morris as a man who exemplified conservative values and who ranked second only to Thomas Jefferson in the pantheon of Barry’s political heroes. To Barry, Morris was an exemplar of pioneer spirit, entrepreneurialism, and love for Arizona. In 1964, when Prescott celebrated its hundredth anniversary and Barry Goldwater was running for president, Barry nominated his uncle as “Man of the Century,” a title Morris won.

Speaking in 1968 to a group of political supporters, Barry had this to say about Morris: “I was first exposed to [politics] when my father died, and an old uncle who had founded the Democratic Party in the territory and helped write the constitution, sort of became my mentor. And the things he taught me, coming from his Democratic-oriented mind, serve me very well today as a Republican, because he was what I would call a conservative.”

It was that legacy from Morris–of public service, party loyalty, and conservative values–that Barry Goldwater carried with him into the political arena when he entered his first elected office as a city council member in Phoenix in 1949. The next year he managed the campaign of Arizona’s first Republican governor in 30 years. Then in 1952 Barry Goldwater defied the odds by winning a seat of his own in the U.S. Senate.

Of course, Barry’s party was not Morris’s party, but then neither was the Democratic Party of the 1950s the one Morris had built at the turn of the century. And so one of the lessons Morris left to Barry–a lesson that partisans of all stripes are too quick to forget–is that party isn’t everything. Though a loyal Republican, Goldwater was also a friend of Democrats.

Morris had been a father of the Arizona Democratic Party; his nephew Barry became a father of the Arizona Republican Party. Their relationship is a potent reminder that the partisan divide does not separate good Americans from bad Americans–or even the good from the best.

Jason LaBau is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West (ICW). He is currently at work on a book about the history of Republican politics in Arizona.

*Photo courtesy of phxwebguy.

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Nowhere is the dubious power of visual media in politics more apparent than in presidential debates. On the one hand, the debates recreate a public square, as they remain the only moments in a campaign when large numbers of voters focus in simultaneously on the election. Even at a time when mass audiences are shrinking as entertainment and information sources multiply, Americans are tuning in to these debates in great numbers. More than 60 million Americans watched Barack Obama debate John McCain in a single night in 2008. And if the 2011 Republican primary debates are any indication of what’s to come this time around, ratings will surpass that level in 2012. Viewership in the nine GOP primary debates so far this year is double that of 2007-2008, with the Fox News/Google debate on September 22 setting a primary debate record of 6.1 million viewers.

At the same time, though, the debates have always led to worries about their seriousness and substantive depth. From the very first televised presidential primary debates in 1956 and general election debates in 1960 (the four so-called Great Debates between Kennedy and Nixon), critics have argued that presidential debates are neither great (they substitute image for substance) nor debates (they enable evasiveness over direct engagement). Following the final Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960, the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote an op-ed entitled, “Washington Would Have a Lost a TV Debate,” and took aim at the broadcasts for favoring the “the glib, the evasive, the dogmatic, the melodramatic” over “the sincere, the judicious, the sober, the honest in political discussion.”

If Commager had lived to see the latest debates, his judgment certainly would have been only harsher, as today response times have been shortened to as little as 30 seconds, and, increasingly, performance is measured in terms of memorable sound bites, zingers, and theatrical gestures–not ideas. Texas Governor Rick Perry may not have demonstrated much clarity or eloquence in the debates to date, but his offstage criticism of them (when wondering aloud if he couldn’t skip the rest) seems quite accurate. As he recently told Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, “These debates are set up for nothing more than to tear down the candidates. It’s pretty hard to sit and lay out your ideas and concepts with a one-minute response … [A]ll they’re interested in is stirring up between the candidates instead of really talking about the issues that are important to the American people.”

Concerns about the merit and value of the debates take on special urgency in times, like now, when the debates seem to be exerting an unusual degree of influence. Indeed, it is hard to recall another pre-primary season when debates have so dramatically altered the field.

It is not just that Herman Cain’s rise, Gov. Perry’s swoon, and Mitt Romney’s steadiness all seem directly connected to their respective debate performances. What is also remarkable is how the debates now serve the unintended role of prolonging and strengthening the political lives of the weakest candidates, providing them with a platform to seek popularity and enrichment (as appears to be the case with Cain and Newt Gingrich) or to voice ideological positions at the margins of the party (Ron Paul). As Fred Barnes wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in October, “The biggest beneficiaries of increased viewership are the also-rans. The debates keep them in the race. At no cost, they get the attention of millions more voters than they ever could on their own.”

All of which begs the question: Are such debates an appropriate filter for selecting our commander in chief? Given their freewheeling, non-deliberative character, do debates deserve such large, and apparently growing, influence over the process?

Such questions strike at the underlying assumption of all presidential debates: that there is an intrinsic connection between speaking well and being a good leader. But is this the case? And should we not be skeptical of this connection when the meaning of speaking well, as the GOP debates clearly show, has shifted from an eloquent capacity to persuade an audience about an issue to the mere ability to successfully endure the pressure and unpredictability of a high-stakes, semi-uncontrolled public appearance? George W. Bush, whose famous ineloquence did not prevent him from more than holding his own in both the 2000 and 2004 debates, not only in some sense embodied this transition but proclaimed it when his quip in a debate with Gore–“I’ve been known to mangle a syl-abble or two”–skillfully made light of traditional oratory and won supportive laughter from the audience. When speaking well becomes less about persuasion than a test of mettle, winning debates becomes less meaningful than avoiding failure. As Bush later reflected in 2007 about the debates, “I’m not sure you ever win them, but you darn sure can lose them.”

The numerous GOP debates this cycle have accelerated this redefinition of what constitutes competent public speech. The greatest blunders have not been substantive or tactical errors (like Gerald Ford’s assertion in 1976 that there was no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe), but poor deliveries of otherwise cogent points. Arguably the single greatest gaffe in the debates so far–Perry’s painfully awkward attempt to recite a litany of Romney’s flip-flops in the Fox News/Google debate–received poor reviews not for being untrue, but for being so ineffectively expressed. Cain, for his part, has impressed as an orator, not necessarily because of the substance of what he says, but because of the steady sonority and indomitable jocularity with which he says it. When Romney has done well, it has been more for his capacity to reflect ease and intelligence under pressure than for any particularly successful framing of the agenda. If the issueless politics of personality inaugurated by the television age initially signaled that candidates would seek to persuade voters over non-material, intangible considerations, the GOP debates point to a kind of political discourse increasingly divorced from persuasion of all kinds, where the primary objective is to maintain a composed communicativity under conditions of intense stress and contestation.

It is the injection of risk and uncertainty into what can otherwise be an excessively choreographed process that makes debates so riveting to viewers and the media. In 1984, the infamous GOP strategist Lee Atwater complained the debates were “artificially contrived pressure cookers which do not coincide with actual pressures that confront a president.”

Yet even if the debates are what they are criticized for being, they still serve crucial democratic functions. The capacity to withstand the debates is not altogether irrelevant to the requirements of leadership in a contemporary mass democracy. Once in office, presidents must field questions from an often hostile press, confront hecklers, appear jointly with foreign leaders not always sympathetic to American interests, and, in times of crisis, potentially make spontaneous decisions about what to do or say on the public stage (recall George W. Bush’s exhortation to assembled firefighters at Ground Zero in 2001). Being able to think on one’s feet and display extemporaneous wit and charm under pressure is one of the signs of charisma in its healthy, politically necessary form.

The combative, risk-filled nature of the debates not only filters people suited for this role but to a certain extent trains them. The debates, for all their limitations, require preparation, discipline, and an ability to focus on alternative viewpoints, even if only to reject them. Such preparation pulls candidates out of the myopia and sycophancy of their own campaign bubble. As Bill Clinton put it in an interview with Jim Lehrer, “Even if these debates don’t change many votes and, you know, normally both sides do well enough so they can avoid any lasting damage, but having to do them and knowing that if you blow it, they will change a lot of votes, forces people who wish to be president to do things that they should do. And I am convinced that the debates I went through, especially those three in 1992, actually helped me to be a better president.”

The debates are also the closest thing we have to a communal hazing of our future leaders–something which has a clear, if unorthodox, egalitarian value in a democratic society. Most of the time, candidates and their handlers maintain strict control over the conditions of publicity, choosing when and how to appear, and performing carefully orchestrated public relations events. The debates offer a rare break from such isolation and imperiousness.

Yes, these debates (which increasingly revert to their literal, etymological meaning of battles) are far from ideal political discourse. But they still provide some of the most democratic moments of the political calendar. When we vote, we choose our leaders. But in the debates, we see them and achieve an all-too-rare surveillance of their persons.

Jeffrey Green is assistant professor of political science at University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship.

*Photo courtesy of IowaPolitics.com.

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