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Brokered Conventions Are Unlikely, and That's a Good Thing

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- If the presidential candidates continue to slug and slog through the campaign, if the voters continue to deliver one primary victory to one contender and the next to another contender, if the political calendar's front-loading doesn't produce a front-runner in each party, then won't we have the spectacle of a brokered convention, or maybe even two, and wouldn't that be great? The answers: Probably not. Probably not.

Hold your horses, all you political horse-race addicts. There very likely won't be a brokered convention. And if there is, it won't be good.

It may be good theater; it may be a jobs program for political pundits; it may focus some attention on American politics from an electorate that seems beleaguered, not beguiled; but it won't be a great moment in American politics. If, as Jane Addams once said, the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy, then a brokered convention is not what the democracy doctor is ordering right now.

Make no mistake: The brokered convention that many members of the commentariat are yearning for, mostly for their own amusement, would not be an elevating exercise in democratic principles.

There is, to be sure, something exciting about the notion that a deal is being made -- and the hunt for the big secrets behind the big deal can go on for ages. Analogue: People are still sorting out the Corrupt Bargain of 1824 that gave the presidency to John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson, an episode that no one has ever described as democratic. (Jackson beat Adams handily in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.)

Go back to one of the very few 20th-century precedents for this election, a time when no vice president or president was seeking the White House. The 1920 Democratic National Convention began with former Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson's son-in-law, as a curious sort of front-runner who had withdrawn from the race a few days before the proceedings opened in San Francisco.

McAdoo led on the first ballot, followed closely by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and then by Govs. James M. Cox of Ohio and Alfred E. Smith of New York, both with about half the support of the two presumptive leaders. For three days the Democrats, who in those days required a two-thirds margin for nomination, conducted ballot after ballot. On the 44th ballot Cox finally prevailed. He is remembered, if at all, for having chosen Franklin D. Roosevelt, then the callow assistant secretary of the Navy, as his running mate.

There was nothing democratic about those proceedings, unless you argue that the decision finally was made by a convention vote. But it's a stretch to say that in that convention (or in the Republican convention of the same year, which on the 10th ballot settled on Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio, who came in sixth place in the first ballot, behind even the president of Columbia University) the people's voices were heard. It was the politicos' voices that were heard.

Though Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey won the Democratic nomination in 1968 without having entered a single primary, hardly anyone alive has attended a brokered convention or watched as party leaders resolved a deadlock by presenting a vice presidential nomination to the losing wing of a party, or played sectional politics by buying off the convention delegates of one region with favors or promises.

It's the stuff of legends and stories, many of them untrue. The only more American a political venue than the smoke-filled room -- the phrase, coined by an Associated Press reporter, refers to a suite in the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago, where party elders settled on Harding's nomination -- is the voting booth.

That's why it is a triumph of the American system that the last conventions to go more than one ballot were the Democrats' in 1952 and the Republicans' in 1948. Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee led in the first two Democratic ballots in 1952, only to be surpassed by Gov. Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois on the third. Gov. Thomas E. Dewey of New York led the first two GOP ballots in 1948 and wrapped up the nomination on the third.

In a few days' time the 2008 campaign, with its next phase here in Alabama and the other Super Duper States, will be transformed from a parade of primaries and caucuses to a tally of convention delegates -- and in modern times it is convention delegates that matter. There will likely be very little bargaining because the candidates who have dropped out have few, if any, delegates to bargain away. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, long gone from the race, is not going to hold the balance of power in the Democratic nomination fight. Nor will former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York have much say about the selection of the Republican nominee.

The smart spectator will remember that the sooner the nomination struggles get winnowed down to two-person races, the sooner the notion of a brokered convention will go away, like wind in the willows. In most cases, a brokered convention requires three strong contenders, not two. This is a matter more of mathematics than of chemistry or physics. Any race where a constant number of delegates can be divided into two is more likely to come to a resolution. Ask your eighth-grader.

That's why the Republican race, more unsettled than the Democratic race, is the slightly better candidate. That counts on former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas staying in and staying strong, winning states like this one on Tuesday.

"The primaries and caucuses are actually doing what they have done historically," says G. Terry Madonna, director of the Floyd Institute's Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College. "They are winnowing out the field."

So the chances of a brokered convention are thankfully small. But no columnist or analyst can say for sure. A better columnist than I am wrote the following right before the 1924 Democratic National Convention: "Everything is uncertain in this convention but one thing: John W. Davis will never be nominated." One hundred and three ballots later, H.L. Mencken regretted those words.

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