Nominating a president
- New York Praeger 1980
- 147p.
offers a revealing insight into the way Americans choose a President and into the dramatic changes in recent years in the nominating process-changes brought on not only by reforms and campaign spending limits, but by the news and advertising media, by new polling techniques and by the changing fabric of the electorate itself.
Key political operatives and those in the news media who cover politics were brought together for a conference at the Institute of Politics at Harvard to take a close and candid look at the nominat ing process. Their expressed views at the conference form the basis for this book. The conferees began with the changing character of the New Hampshire primary election and then weighed primaries against caucuses, the impact of rele vision, how the issues are covered by the press and the effects of reform and counter-reform. In all of this some juicy pieces of meat were chewed-new insights revealed, motivations bared and analytical connections made.
It was acknowledged that the shakedown of the new nominating pro cedures and campaign finance laws. was still going on, that the system was still being tested. But there were interest ing differences of opinion-ranging from Robert Scheer's insistence thar issues were not being adequately cov ered to Christopher Lydon's metaphor of Carter as a character in an ongoing television drama. There was cynicism and idealism: cynicism for instance in some of the exchanges between hard-bitten, campaign-tested political reporters and operatives concerning mutual "conning" about candidates expectations and stratagems: idealism in concern for the fairness of the process innot favoring the incumbent over the challengers Jonathan Moore director of the Insti rute of Politics, offers a concise critique of the conference in his Afterword.