An apology to Dean Phillips

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A good many American blowhards owe Rep. Dean Phillips an apology. I’m one of them.

Nine months ago I published a somewhat snide column in this space needling Minnesota’s Third District congressman for adding his name to a long and largely forgotten honor roll of Minnesota “also-rans.” Phillips had just then announced his unlikely candidacy for president, offering himself to fellow Democrats as an alternative to incumbent President Joe Biden because no better-known grandee of the party would risk such an uprising. Phillips feared many were “underestimating the danger that voters’ uneasiness over Biden’s age and frailty will cool support just enough” to bring the re-election of Donald Trump.

I acknowledged that Phillips’ warning was plausible while his motives seemed “sincere and selfless.” But I cautioned that history reveals few examples of an incumbent party’s grip on the White House being strengthened by an internal challenge to a president’s re-nomination.

But look, folks — as the president himself might say — if in the end Democratic Party insiders and their media allies were going to confront Biden’s helplessness to convey physical vigor and mental vitality to voters, it surely would have been more effective and humane to wake up last year when Phillips sounded the alarm, rather than just since the president’s late June embarrassment on the debate stage.

Why wasn’t Phillips able to inspire a timely effort within the Democratic establishment to challenge Biden’s renomination? Partly, no doubt, many simply hoped the president and those around him could better conceal his visible decline, or at least that voters wouldn’t be unduly alarmed by it. In turn this hope was likely sustained in part by progressive America’s utter inability to this day to comprehend Donald Trump’s formidable political appeal. Surely, many apparently imagined, even a doddering, tottering, blundering Joe Biden could readily dispatch a felonious, fascistic, twice-impeached vulgarian.

But at a more practical level Phillips probably got ignored simply because jettisoning Biden would have been, as it remains, difficult. That is thanks to what the British news weekly the Economist recently called a “dysfunction afflicting both major parties.”

More bluntly than the Brits care to put it, this particular existential threat to democracy consists in the fact that today there’s too damn much democracy in our political system.

“Leaders of both parties long ago surrendered any decisive role in choosing nominees,” the Economist argues, suggesting that this surrender explains both why Trump has been able to complete a “hostile takeover of the Republican Party” and why Democratic heavyweights are having such public fits trying to “co-ordinate their various power centers in Congress and state governments to provide a clear vote of ... no-confidence in their candidate.”

What’s more, even if Democratic leaders had decided to start coordinating that effort last year, the completely dominant role of primaries in today’s nomination processes gives a crushing advantage to an incumbent with an enormous campaign war chest.

It wasn’t always this way. In a 2019 column concerning these historical trends I dubbed Donald Trump’s initial 2016 conquest of the GOP — its culmination so vividly on display in Milwaukee last week — “the crowning achievement of more than a century’s political reform aimed at dis-empowering loathsome political party ‘bosses.’” But I may have been premature.

The “uproar” this summer over Biden’s candidacy, as the Economist calls it, may mean the 2024 campaign now represents the total, final eclipse of political party discipline in America, with both the GOP and the Democrats apparently heading to the polls with candidates who in different ways give even many loyal party members the willies.

All this reflects the thinking of a school of contrarian scholars and pundits often called “political realists.” In a nutshell political realists think too much reform has deformed our democracy. In earlier columns I’ve noted that many realists argue our politics were healthier before idealistic American reformers started fixing everything — passing laws and changing party rules over many decades to steadily reduce the power of political professionals.

The basic “realistic” idea is that when the path to nomination and the ballot for candidates at every level was significantly influenced by political bosses, insiders, handlers, hacks and dealmakers (the unflattering labels are many) their proverbial back rooms were filled not only with smoke but with pragmatic, dry-eyed concern for the long-term vote-getting success of their parties. This businesslike focus provided moderating balance to the zealotry of ideologues and the charisma of political superstars. What’s more, as the Economist puts it, bosses were “whatever their flaws … particularly astute judges of their fellow politicians.”

If party organizations, and especially their moderating tendencies, are to regain any of the ground surrendered to personality politics over the past century it may have to be through ad hoc, seat-of-the-pants efforts like the one Phillips started to nudge Biden out of the race. Biden is president, after all, largely because of a rather similar scramble of party leaders in 2020 to change the course of that cycle’s nomination campaign.

Recall that Biden had flopped in early 2020 contests, running fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire and a distant second in Nevada. The most proudly radical hopeful, democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, was running strong and threatening to stage the kind of divide-and-conquer insurgency Trump had used to seize the GOP nomination in 2016.

But then, abruptly, the Democratic establishment rallied, with South Carolina’s Jim Clyburn, Minnesota’s own Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and others lining up to unite behind Biden, who still was seen as the leading moderate alternative, in a way mainstream Republicans had never coalesced in opposition to Trump.

Can a somewhat similar emergency mustering of prominent Democrats now persuade Biden to make way for a new candidate to oppose Trump’s return?

Whatever the answer, and whatever the final outcome of their success or failure, we may be seeing the beginning of a new approach to realistic party politics.

D.J. Tice is a retired Star Tribune commentary editor. He’s at djtice6215@gmail.com.