Gary Hart: Unintended consequences in 2008 election

Former Colo. Sen. Gary Hart (center), flanked by former Denver Mayor Federico Peña and current Mayor John Hickenlooper, attend a rally in Denver for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, Jan. 30, 2008. (RJ Sangosti / The Denver Post)

It is a constant cause for wonder that otherwise competent and thoughtful people who maintain and operate major political parties so often get it wrong. More often than not confusion seems to be generated by the failure to think through the consequences of organizational decisions that are often adopted to solve short-term problems but that cause even bigger ones. Too few politicians are chess players who can see two, three, or even more moves ahead.

The Republican Party has adopted winner-take-all primaries by and large, and thus when a candidate like John McCain gets on a roll he runs up a near delegate majority before those who oppose him can regroup. You may see neoconservatives and the religious right, who seem to detest Sen. McCain for their own narrow reasons, pushing through some major rules changes before 2012, especially if McCain is not successful.

On the Democratic side a system of automatic or so-called "super" delegates, composed of party leaders and elected officials, was imposed in the early 1980s to insure that bigwigs did not lose out on convention participation simply because they backed an unsuccessful candidate, as happened in 1972 and thereafter. But those pushing the super-delegate system seem not to have considered what might happen if no single candidate amassed a majority of committed delegates during primaries and caucuses and the automatic delegates had to choose the party nominee all by themselves.

That happened in 1984 and it will probably happen again this year. In 1984, the superdelegates selected a candidate who lost badly in the general election. So, whatever made them "super" did not also make them smart.

Now, all of a sudden, pundits and bloggers are raising Cain about "party bosses" and "the will of the people" and so on as if no one had ever really thought through the system that was created 25 years ago. And to heighten the drama, there are two states, Michigan and Florida, that broke party rules organizing the timing of primaries and no one seems to know what should be done with them. Sen. Clinton skirted the edge of the rules and campaigned in those states and now claims their delegates; delegates that could make the difference in the nomination. Sen. Obama observed the rules and did not campaign and he would be prejudiced by such an outcome.

This analysis is not to propose solutions. It is to encourage party officials and politicians to think ahead, to consider the consequences of decisions made in reaction and in haste.

Nominating a future president is too important to be left to "Gee whiz, how did we screw this up?" kinds of responses. Our country's future and our leadership in the world are at stake.

So, whoever the nominees are and whoever gets elected, perhaps both parties ought to hold long retreats later on in which mature, disinterested, patriotic adults take over our political parties and operate them as the kind of serious political institutions our citizens deserve and our country requires.

Gary Hart is co-chair of the Presidential Climate Action Plan national advisory committee, based at the University of Colorado. He represented Colorado as a U.S. Senator from 1975 to 1987, and ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984 and 1988. He has endorsed Barack Obama for president.

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