David Yepsen wrote an interesting article yesterday praising the regional primary plan proposed by Senators Alexander, Klobuchar, and Leiberman.

He writes:

Three U.S. senators are introducing a bill to sort out the early congestion of presidential primaries and caucuses by requiring most states to participate in rotating regional contests starting in 2012.

It's a good reform. Something's got to be done to improve the way we pick our presidents. This plan would give more Americans a say in who our president is.

I disagree. I think one of the major problems with all of these reforms is that we support them for reasons other than our stated ones. I think that is the case here. There are two related reasons I think this.

First, this reform will not give more Americans a say than the number that has a say in this year's system. As I argued in June, I think this year's system offers a better mix of fairness and representativeness than this proposal. Second, it is amazing to me that we are talking about reforming an electing system other than the obviously unfair and unrepresentative one we have in place to elect House members.

How do we explain our desire to reform the (relatively fair and representative) presidential nominating system and our satisfaction with the (unfair and non-representative) House electing system? It cannot be by recourse to our desire for a more fair and representative system!

My intuition is that Americans just do not like political campaigns all that much. We have what amounts to a national primary day in this cycle, which in turn has induced candidates to begin their campaigns early. And Americans just don't like campaigns in which politicians disagree and call each other names. We're all Hamiltonians at heart. We should all see eye-to-eye. We should stop all of this petty politicking, and just do "the people's business." And so on.

If this is the motivating force behind these reforms, then we should abandon them - and face reality. The only way to stop nasty campaigns is to stop campaigns altogether - which in turn requires one to make the right to vote meaningless. A robust democracy implies many competitive electoral campaigns, therefore parties who manage those campaigns, therefore partisanship, and therefore partisan bickering and all the nasty things that non-engaged voters despise. So, if you want to cut down on the nastiness, the chances are that you are cutting down on the robustness of your democracy.

This, of course, is exactly what has been happening. Time and again, our reforms - which were designed to reduce the nastiness and dirtiness of an inherently nasty and dirty project like democracy - have made our government less democratic. Reforms render our electoral system less competitive, therefore more favorable to current office holders, and therefore less effective at inducing governmental accountability.

This is not coincidental. Unfortunately, much of this has happened because voters have this naive Hamiltonian view that conflicts with their preference for accountability. Politicians are happy to enshrine the former into our electoral laws precisely because it conflicts with the latter. While our views are conflicted - we want lots of democratic accountability without the corresponding nastiness - politicians' views are not. They prefer minimum competition. An absence of competition necessarily favors the current office holder. So, politicians like to satisfy voters' shallow preferences for a nice electoral process by thwarting their more important preference for democratic accountability.

This, of course, is exactly what they have done with the House of Representatives. Chances are good that you did not have a nasty campaign in your House district last year. But that, in turn, means that your incumbent won in a walk. Isn't that amazing? After the unmitigated disaster that was the 109th Congress - your incumbent won in a walk. How'd that happen? It happened because we have ridiculously designed districts that favor incumbents who can afford to travel all through it and who can play one district interest off another. We have campaign finance laws that make it next-to-impossible for challengers to raise funds, thus favoring incumbents. We have prevented the parties from assisting challengers, thus favoring incumbents. We have decimated the state parties, thus favoring incumbents who cultivate personal followings. We choose party nominees by primary elections that nobody participates in, thus favoring incumbents. And so on. Time and again - Americans have asked for reforms that cut down on all the fighting, and they get exactly that. But they come at quite a cost. Namely, a 95% incumbency retention rate. Even for a waste-of-space Congress like the 109th, which dawdled and bickered and wasted our money and tried to seduce former pages and took all kinds of bribes and kickbacks while the war went into the toilet - 95% of the members who wanted to return were allowed to.

This is reason to celebrate this year's presidential nominating system. It is not the product of coordinated machinations by strategic, ambitious politicians. Unlike our gerrymandered-into-stasis House, this year's system is the product of individual states acting independently of one another. The result is a wild, crazy, unruly system that will probably, as a consequence, be quite competitive and therefore representative!

It would be a shame if it were to be eliminated because Americans do not like the idea of political ads being run in July. Politicians will gladly change it based upon such a shallow preference. And, of course, they'll change it to something that favors their interests. One obvious beneficiary of this particular bill would be a high-profile senator. If his region comes up first in the lottery, he will have an advantage. He can use his regional prestige to win the first round of contests, thus creating momentum to win the nomination and making the rest of the competition an afterthought. This bill regulates and restricts competition - guess who benefits?

I'd wager that at least five senators will vote for or against any proposal based upon their assessments of how it helps their chances of becoming president. That's reason enough not to trust Congress to handle this issue.

I say - let's keep the current system. It's messy. It's unpredictable. It's competitive. Politicians hate it. It's just what we need.