Tim Cahill: There is Nothing Democratic About Conventions

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Tim Cahill, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

Tim Cahill, GoLocalWorcester MINDSETTER™

As I sit here in Quincy on a cool, damp Saturday morning, there are approximately 4,000 Democrats descending on Springfield to exercise their rights as delegates to choose their standard bearer for the US Senate race against incumbent Scott Brown. A lot will take place over the next five or six hours, but democracy will not be one of them. And no matter how loud Marisa DeFranco screams about rights or free speech, all anyone there will be listening to is orders from party leaders.

Now I might end up being wrong, but Ms. DeFranco has about as much chance of getting her 15% as I do. The reason for this is that conventions, both Democratic and Republican, were never created to provide a democratic process for choosing a candidate. They have always been a vehicle to give the party leaders the power to put their candidate in the best position to win the general election against the other party's choice.

That is main reason why John Kennedy became the first presidential candidate to compete in state primaries in order to give himself a chance at the Democratic nomination for President in 1960. If left to the party leaders, he would not have stood a chance at being nominated.

I attended my first state convention in 1982. That was the year of the legendary grudge match between former Governor Mike Dukakis and the man who had defeated him, Ed King. The convention itself was a creation of the Dukakis operatives who desperately wanted a one-on-one match between their man and King. Their sole purpose in resurrecting the convention was for the undemocratic purpose of keeping fellow-liberal, Lt. Governor Tom O'Neill off the primary ballot.

As a young, idealistic delegate, I thought I was going to experience democracy at its finest. Instead what I witnessed was raw, unadulterated power politics. The bitter feud between the Dukakis and King forces was something to behold. King delegates(of which I was one)were cursed and questioned at every step. Credentials were checked and rechecked and more often than not challenged. Instead of practicing free speech, we were instead told what to do and say, and who to say it to.

The Dukakis forces got what they came for. Not only did they soundly beat King for the party's nomination, but more importantly, they kept a sitting, twice elected Lt. Governor whose father was the Speaker of the US House of Representatives off the September ballot. And because Dukakis was not forced to split the vote with another like-minded liberal, as he did in 1978, he easily defeated King in the election.

I experienced my own unique sense of democracy when I decided to run for state treasurer twenty years later. At that time the party leaders were mostly split between the candidacies of former state representative Jim Seigel and Boston city councillor Steve Murphy. I and the other Cahill in the race(funny how these coincidences happen), were both desperately trying to take the third spot in order to qualify for the primary ballot.

With the insiders support of the two leading candidates it would be unlikely that both of the candidates named Cahill would make it. That is, unless the party leaders saw that as a better outcome for either of the top two choices. So, on the night before the convention, a back-room deal was hatched to dispense with the actual voting and just qualify all four candidates for the September ballot. This way, the thinking went, the party's preferred candidates would have a much better chance if both Timothy Patrick Cahill and Michael Patrick Cahill were on the ballot in September.

So you see, Marisa, when it comes to conventions and their delegates, it's not about democracy and free choice. It is about doing what you are told is in the best interest of the party. Sometimes, as in the case with Mike Dukakis in 1982, it works just like they game-planned it. And other times, as in 2002, they can underestimate the will of the candidate getting game-planned. The only true democratic process is still the secret ballot on election day. And if you don't make it there, you will never experience true democracy. Conventions cannot and will not ever measure up. If they did they would not be conventions.