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 DONALD TRUMP COMES OUT FOR ROMNEY: "Here's my final offer: $10,000 for each delegate who's willing to switch over and vote for Romney at the convention!!!" |
A wide-open convention
could be a donnybrook
of TheColumnists.com
Folks, we may be
headed for something that we haven’t seen in decades: A
brokered Republican convention. The possibility is remote, but
it exists.
For those few of you unfamiliar with the term, it means a convention
where the delegates arrive without a certain knowledge of who
is going to be the party’s nominee, and the matter is settled
by negotiations--deal-making--at the convention.
The last time that happened, the Republicans nominated Dwight
Eisenhower over Robert Taft in 1952 and the Democrats nominated
Adlai Stevenson over a bunch of lesser lights, including Estes
Kefauver, a senator from Tennessee who sometimes wore a coonskin
cap at photo ops.
It means that backers of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul
and Rick Santorum will gather in Tampa starting on Aug. 27 and
try to make deals that will put their man over the top. Mitt
will probably arrive with the most pledged delegates, but there
is a chance--just a chance, mind you--that he may not have quite
enough, creating a scene of jostling chaos.
Jostling chaos, of course, is what the hordes of political reporters
on hand love more than anything except a free buffet. The cable
and broadcast network news departments, disdainful of gavel-to-gavel
coverage of national political conventions over the past 20 years
or so, would have to double down and really pay attention.
Can’t you see the television reporters down on the convention
floor passing on the latest rumors? "Ron Paul has thrown
his delegates to Newt/!” “No! It now seems that Paul
is shifting his delegates to Santorum!” “Gingrich remains
adamant that Romney will be blocked!” “Santorum is
praying!”*
For more than 50 years the conventions have been a bit of an
anti-climax, with the winner already determined by picking up
a sufficient amount of delegates in the party primaries to arrive
at the convenstion with the nomination locked up. The excitement,
such as it is, revolved around the putative nominee’s choice
for vice president.
Reporters dreamed that the nominee would “throw it open
to the convention” thereby creating a wonderful 24-hour
free-for-all.
Under Republican Party rules, there are 2,286 delegates, and
a candidate must accumulate 1,144 delegate votes to win. Dislike
of Romney runs high in some areas of the Republican Party. If
Gingrich, Paul and Santorum manage to block Romney from acquiring
those 1,144 delegates during the primaries, and then overcome
the nasty things they will have been saying about each other
during the preceding months, get together at the convention to
form an “Anyone But Mitt” coalition, what
then? None of the three will have a prayer of being nominated,
and that means the conventioneers might turn to someone “outside”
-- a politician who remained aloof from the primaries.
Who? Well, the two most prominent names bandied about by devotees
of
far-out political speculation (which you are if you are reading
right now) are Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and New Jersey
Governor Chris Christie. Daniels is widely respected as a fiscal
expert and Christieis regarded as a rising, if rotund, Republican
star.
But why should either man run for president on a Republican ticket that very likely might go down to the formidable Obama campaign operation? The two might very well decide to hold off until 2016, when the country could be in a mood for a Republican.
And let it be noted here that Donald Trump
has been making noises--again--about running for president. He
has told inteviewers, “I will if I have to.”
Then he endorsed Mitt Romney. The chances of The Donald getting
the nod from a deadlocked Republican convention are about the
same as Madonna’s.
What do you suppose the effect of an intensely televised brokered
convention would have on voters in the November general election?
Would viewers get so wrapped up in it that they would vote for
the winner?
Would it increase Republican voter turnout because of presumed
heightened interest in a real convention contest? Or would it
turn voters off because of all the blatant politicking? What
would it mean for viewership of what will be a much more sedate
Democratic National Convention?
The emphasis, of course, must be on the third word in the first
sentence, above: “may.” It probably won’t happen,
but it might.
Let’s hear it for a smoke-filled room.
©2012 by Charles M. McFadden. The McFadden caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted Feb. 6, 2012.
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