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American party nominations have been, are currently, and will forever be a total Charlie Foxtrot. The Democratic 1860 Conventions were so bad they decided to p

American party nominations have been, are currently, and will forever be a total Charlie Foxtrot. The Democratic 1860 Conventions were so bad they decided to put up two candidates, had to do it over a few times, had many walkouts, and effectively seceded Lincoln the Presidency and engulfed the nation in war as a result. It was so bad it literally was a cause of the Civil War. The 1912 Republican Convention literally split the party, with the fisticuffs and black eyes to prove it. Edumnd Morris has a good bit on that one and the hijinks, corruption, vote-selling, and smoke filled rooms in his Theodore Rex series. To us today, it's ghastly. I think it was the 1952 National Conventions that really exposed to the public what a mess it all is, as they were the first ones to be televised. During the process people intentionally lit newspapers on fire in order to cause chaos (my memory is a bit fuzzy here though). The 1964 Republican convention at SF's Cow Palace, dubbed Conservative Woodstock, was more of a Nazi rally than anything else. Reporters had racial and sexist slurs screamed at them until they ran for their lives. The state caucuses are a reflection of these conventions and America itself; drunken, insane, corrupt, spectacle.

dkarl 7y ago
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. I think people inside the apparatus of both parties see the arcane and chaotic aspects of the process as their chance to put their fingers on the scales, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's what this brouhaha in Iowa is about -- a fight between people at the precinct level who want to maintain their power to influence the results by interpreting the rules this way or that, and people at the state level who want to iron out these "irregularities" (probably while maintaining any power they have at the state level to perpetrate similar shenanigans.) The public can and should put pressure on the parties to adopt more legible and transparent processes.

dkarl 7y ago

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. I think people inside the apparatus of both parties see the arcane and chaotic aspects of the process as their chance to put their fingers on the scales, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's what this brouhaha in Iowa is about -- a fight between people at the precinct level who want to maintain their power to influence the results by interpreting the rules this way or that, and people at the state level who want to iron out these "irregularities" (probably while maintaining any power they have at the state level to perpetrate similar shenanigans.) The public can and should put pressure on the parties to adopt more legible and transparent processes.