Mickey Edwards: Turning Republicans and Democrats into Americans
By Steve Byas
Former Congressman Mickey Edwards spoke at the OU Student Union late last fall at a president's associates dinner hosted by OU President David Boren, on the same subject as Edwards' latest book, The Parties versus The People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans. For Edwards, as with Boren, if more politicians would simply jettison their devotion to a political party, gridlock would vanish, and we would all wake up in a Bipartisan Nirvana, heavily laced with compromise all around. The theme of the book is clear: "We have created a polarized system that rewards the intransigent and punishes compromise," Edwards said.It is a theme that seems to pervade these series of banquets hosted by Boren, with all of the speakers basically promoting some aspect of agreement with the president of the University of Oklahoma. One simply cannot imagine Boren inviting, say, a Ron Paul, or a Dennis Kucinich to one of these affairs. It is widely agreed that Boren has done a masterful job at OU, but he certainly utilizes his position to promote his political viewpoint. Speaking of Edwards' book, Boren said, "His book gives practical, concrete suggestions to put positive incentives back into the system."
I well remember working as a campus coordinator in Mickey Edwards' first winning campaign in 1976, and how elated I was that Edwards had won, first the Republican primary with a strong conservative campaign, then the general election. From his speech and his book, however, Edwards seems almost ashamed of his strong conservative campaign and subsequent mostly conservative performance in Congress. After leaving Congress in 1992, Edwards taught at Princeton in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which may explain a lot.
Political parties are bad for the country appears to be the overarching theme of Edwards' book. He notes that Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Adams all "agreed" not to create political parties. While it is very clear that George Washington, in his Farewell Address, warned against putting political parties over the good of the country, I do not recall when this decision to not create political parties was made by Jefferson and the others. Jefferson and Adams were not even at the constitutional convention, and Jefferson was the founder of the "Republican Party," which evolved into our modern Democratic Party [sort of]. Certainly political parties are not provided for in the Constitution, but they emerged quickly, as one might expect in a free society.
Edwards' examples of "good" politicians are all those with more moderate and establishment pedigrees. He likes Utah's Robert Bennett, and Delaware's Mike Castle, for example, while dismissing the strongly conservative Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Jim De Mint, and Justin Amash. He contends that "hyper-partisan" subsets dominate the political process, saying that if a politician chooses to cooperate [reach across the aisle, like John McCain], then "you're going to get primaried."
When I addressed this specific point with Edwards a few weeks after the event, he told me that I had read something into his speech that he did not say. "My point wasn't that Cruz, Lee, Amash, or De Mint was a bad guy. I said their elections were not a result of being the popular choice of the voters but because they were the choice of a very small percentage of the electorate. Mike Castle is not a conservative and he and I disagreed on many things but the fact is, he was a better representative of Delaware's political views. In the Utah example [where Mike Lee defeated Robert Bennett at the Republican State Convention], the idea that 3400 people could dictate the choices for senator in a state of three million is outrageous. What I'm for is voters having the greatest number of possible choices when it comes to selecting who will be making decisions about spending, taxing, going to war, etc. It is a combination of closed primaries and sore loser laws that makes the system so bad. I'm a conservative and there were issues on which I would not compromise, but I believe in constitutional self-government and I think there are times when, after one has fought vigorously, there has to be compromise or there won't be any appropriations for even legitimate government purposes (national defense, for example)."
To solve this problem, Edwards suggests not allowing candidates to be identified on the ballot by political party. Under the Edwards proposal, all candidates would run in one giant primary, with the top two vote-getters (if no one received a majority), regardless of party, facing off in a general election. Louisiana presently uses such a system, but for some reason that state does not appear to be heaven on earth. A race in Louisiana about twenty years ago illustrates one danger of this partyless campaigning. David Duke, a "Republican," and Edwin Edwards, a former Democrat governor, ran at the top of the partyless primary. Duke, one might recall, was a "former" official with the Ku Klux Klan, while Edwards had been indicted for corruption charges during a former stint in office.
It is highly unlikely that Duke or Edwards could have won a closed primary. In the open primary, however, they had enough core of support that their minority positions was enough to run first and second. So, as bumper stickers in Louisiana said at the time, it was a choice between the crook and the bigot.
Despite my clear criticism of this part of his speech, Edwards was gracious in his response to me when we discussed this a few weeks later. "The Louisiana example is troublesome of course," Edwards conceded to me. "But you're assuming the results would have been different in a closed primary: there's nothing to indicate that would have been the case. Duke ran many times and won only once, for a single term in the state legislature, which he won because his opponent indicated he would support a property tax increase. In his campaign for governor, Duke got only 34 percent in the first round and then lost in the runoff. Edwin Edwards got most of the Democrats' votes because former Democratic governor Buddy Roemer, who was also in the race, had alienated Democrats by switching to Republican. The fact is, among the Republican candidates, Duke did finish first in the first round and among the Democrats, Edwards finished first in the first round, and there's no reason to think that would have been any different if the system was different."
I doubt this is what Edwards and Boren have in mind with their No Labels effort, but I think the closed primaries are better at weeding out the weirdos than these open primaries they admire so much. Voters in closed primaries tend to be better informed than the average voter.
Another evil that Edwards proposes to slay is that of redistricting. Under the Constitution, the framers left the redrawing of congressional district boundaries to the states (the same framers that did not put political parties into the Constitution, by the way). Each legislature redraws the lines, and, as Edwards lamented in his speech, "We allow the dominant party to redraw the district lines." This creates districts wherein the incumbent is less likely to lose [except in those "evil" primaries]. What usually happens is that the party in power in the legislature will put as many voters of the opposite party in one congressional district so as to increase the number of districts represented by the legislature's majority party, leaving a few districts to the minority party. Even in these minority districts, the incumbent is less likely to face strong opposition from the other party. Again, the biggest concern is in the primary.
Edwards gives an example from his own experience. In 1978, and in 1980, Edwards was easily reelected. At the time of the 1980 census, the Democratic Party was overwhelmingly in charge in the Oklahoma Legislature. They took the six districts that Oklahoma was then entitled to, and decided to place as many Republicans as possible into Edwards' fifth congressional district. They were, in effect, conceding one district to the Republicans, but in doing so, were protecting the other Democrats in the rest of the delegation.
As Edwards explained, the Democrats in the Oklahoma Legislature [exercising the constitutional power granted them by the Constitution] took Edwards' urban Oklahoma City district and stretched it through Guthrie, Perry, Ponca City, and north to Kansas and east over to Bartlesville. This was bad, Edwards said, because these folks in northern Oklahoma were now represented by a "city dude" who knew nothing about rural issues.
Interestingly, Edwards did not add, in either his talk or his book, that the Oklahoma Republican Party, led by state Senator Jerry Pierce [from the affected Bartlesville] circulated an initiative petition to overturn the gerrymandered district. He also did not mention that he not only liked the redistricting plan the Democrats concocted, he vigorously fought Pierce's alternative plan tooth and nail. Perhaps Edwards would have joined the effort to overthrow the gerrymander, if he had it to do over.
Interestingly, in today's Oklahoma, the Republican-dominated Oklahoma Legislature drew the lines after the 2010 census to put as many Democrats in the heavily-Democrat second congressional district (eastern Oklahoma), but David Boren's son, Dan, did not run again in 2012, and the seat went to Republican Markwayne Mullin.
Edwards said he would like to see the Democrats and Republicans become more like "Rotary clubs." They could still name someone as their candidate, but no such designation would appear on the ballot. This is basically what happens today with city council races and school board races, which are almost all nonpartisan. The parties put out the word informally as to who is the Democrat and who is the Republican, but the general voting public, with no brand name to select, vote in much smaller margins, usually only in the teens, or even single digits.
When first elected to Congress, Edwards mistakenly walked up to a lectern that was reserved for the Democratic Party, not knowing there was one set aside for the Republicans. He mentioned that there was a Republican cloak room and a Democrat cloak room. He cited these as only two examples of the attitude in Congress that the other party is the enemy, citing Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell's statement that it is his job to "defeat Barack Obama." And, House Democrat Leader Nancy Pelosi has said that it is her job to "elect more Democrats."
Today, Edwards said that he is "embarrassed" that he was part of such a system for so long [sixteen years]. Democrats no doubt preferred the old days when they ran the Congress for forty years. But those were the years when liberalism ran amok, with the expansion of government in the Great Society, the creation of more and more government programs, and so on.
To be fair, partisanship can certainly trump more important principles. For example, Democrats were rabid in opposition to Republican George Bush's trampling of individual constitutional rights in the war on terror, but are just fine with such actions when their guy, Barack Obama, has a kill list. Republicans went along with Bush's excessive spending, the creation of No Child Left Behind, but would have probably opposed a Democrat president for the same such thing. In this, Edwards is absolutely correct: Partisanship for the sake of partisanship is unhealthy. My problem is really not that we have political parties, but I wish we had two political parties, instead of two wings of one Big Government Party. I think Republicans who expand the size and power of the federal government, and attack our constitutional liberties should be "primaried." Lindsey Graham in South Carolina comes to mind as an example of a Republican who needs replacing in a Republican primary.
While agreeing that political parties are bad, Edwards and Boren had different positions on the Electoral College. In answer to a student's question, Edwards supported keeping the Electoral College. As Edwards explained, without the Electoral College, candidates would concentrate on piling up huge majorities in the great population centers of the country. "I think you want a system to pay attention to the areas of the country" that would simply be ignored if we went to a direct, popular vote for president. "I prefer the system we have now."
President Boren rose to challenge Edwards on the Electoral College. He recounted a story of how he got to meet President Harry Truman when Truman campaigned in Oklahoma in 1948. Now, candidates do not come to Oklahoma, Boren lamented, because it is already known Oklahoma is going to go overwhelmingly Republican. Of course, the reason Boren got to meet Truman on the train was because Boren's father was a U.S. Congressman, not just because Oklahoma was more competitive then. (Boren's father, Lyle Boren, was probably more conservative than most Republicans today).
In an answer to a question from Andy Rieger of the Norman Transcript, Edwards discussed the role of the media in perpetuating this supposed malfunction of the government. Edwards lamented how the media likes a contest, and only invites sufficiently combative guests, which helps ratings. He also criticized the "slip-shod reporting" by journalists who simply do not know their subject.
He opposed government financing of campaigns, and counseled that lobbyists do have a First Amendment right to petition the government, designed to protect people from government, not the government from the people. Both Boren and Edwards argue that one should not be able to accept campaign contributions from someone outside the state. Of course, since members of Congress from other states affect our daily lives, I would argue that it only makes sense to send money to elect a good candidate like a Rand Paul in Kentucky or to defeat a John McCain in Arizona.
I guess what I really want is a return to the idea that government should be limited in its scope. I suspect that will not get me invited to speak at a banquet at the University of Oklahoma, however.
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