Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (102 page)

This amendment, which delays any increase in congressional pay until a new Congress is elected, was written by James Madison as part of the original Bill of Rights and proposed by Congress in 1789. But it was not ratified until 1992, in the wake of outrage over congressional gridlock, the power of an incumbent Congress, budget deficits, and several pay raises that took effect immediately after their enactment. Those states that had originally ratified the amendment in the late 1700s did not have to ratify it again. While it theoretically denies a member of Congress from voting himself a raise, the overwhelming number of incumbents who successfully run for reelection means that they usually have to wait just a few months for the raise to come through.

Appendix 2
Is the Electoral College a Party School? A Presidential Election Primer

F
inal figures from the presidential election of 2000 showed that 51.2 percent of Americans of voting age participated in this chance to choose a leader. Plenty of emerging democracies with no voting tradition do better than that. With 50,459,211 votes, George W. Bush was elected with a little more than 47.87 percent of the popular vote. (Al Gore’s 50,992,335 votes equaled 48.38 percent of the popular vote.)

Although the 2000 turnout represented a slight uptick from the 49 percent who voted in the Clinton-Dole-Perot race in 1996, the fact remains that about half of the American voting-age population doesn’t bother to vote. For years, people have been troubled by this continuing American trend toward anemic presidential election turnouts. Many critics of modern American politics point a finger at the numbing banality of presidential campaigns that are all gloss and television image making but little substance. The public perception of a taint in 2000 left many voters embittered to learn that their ballots were not being counted.

Without doubt, there is tremendous apathy in this country when Election Day rolls around—the sense that it doesn’t really matter who gets elected, because nothing changes. This is obviously a dangerous attitude that might produce an unpleasant result somewhere down the line.

Another reason some people don’t bother to vote for president is that it is an insufferably long, drawn-out, and confusing process. This brief introduction to presidential politics is meant to take some of the mystery out of the presidential election system.

What is the Electoral College?

No aspect of the American system is less understood and more bewildering than the Electoral College. Grown men turn weak and stammer when asked who makes up the Electoral College. The subject of a once-every-four-years debate over its existence, the institution plods on, an enigma to those average Americans who think the voters decide who will be president.

Like almost every other creation of the American political system, the Electoral College was the result of a compromise. When the Founding Fathers sat down to write the Constitution and figure out the rules for electing the president, there was only one certainty: George Washington would be the first president. As Ben Franklin told the dele-
gates, “The first man at the helm will be a good one. Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.”

The obvious answer would have seemed to be direct election by the people. But this was opposed by those among the Founding Fathers who feared that too much democracy was a dangerous thing. To maintain control over the presidential process, they came up with the idea of the Electoral College, which gave each state presidential “electors” equal to the number of its senators and representatives in Congress. These “electors,” chosen by whatever means the separate states decided, would vote for two men. The candidate with a majority of electoral votes became president and the second-place finisher became vice president.

But the real safety valve built into this plan was the agreement that if the electoral vote failed to produce a clear winner, the election would be sent to the House of Representatives, where each state would get a single vote. In an era in which no political parties existed, the common wisdom was that after George Washington, no man could win the votes needed for election, and the real decisions would be made by the enlightened men in the Congress.

Within a short time after Washington, two presidential elections failed to produce a victor and were sent to the House of Representatives. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, from the same party, received seventy-three electoral votes each. The election went to the House, which put Jefferson in the White House. Following this election, the voting for president and vice president was separated under the Twelfth Amendment. Then, in 1824, Andrew Jackson led in the popular vote but failed to win a majority of electoral votes. In this case, the House of Representatives bypassed Jackson in favor of John Quincy Adams.

It has happened two more times in American political history. In 1876, Samuel J. Tilden beat Rutherford B. Hayes in the popular vote. But in some scandalous post-election politicking, Hayes collected enough tainted electoral votes to steal the victory. Then again in 1888, Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but lost to Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College.

In 2000, the Electoral College was equal to the 435 members of the House and 100 members of the Senate, plus three electoral votes for the District of Columbia. And who are the mysterious electors? These people, who cannot be members of Congress, are mostly loyalists, or party hacks, appointed by their state political parties to fulfill the largely ceremonial task of casting the electoral votes that were decided on Election Day. However, there is no law stating that these electors must vote for their party’s popularly elected candidate. That antique loophole mostly leads to symbolic protest votes, such as the elector from West Virginia who, in 1988, voted for Lloyd Bentsen for president instead of Michael Dukakis. Tradition and party loyalty have dictated that the Electoral College has upheld the people’s choice on Election Day.

It is difficult to justify the existence of the Electoral College, but it lives on chiefly because most people believed in that old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The Electoral College system had basically affirmed the popular vote for more than 100 years. Until the 2000 election. Promises of reform or a constitutional amendment to do away with the Electoral College have floundered in the aftermath of September 11.

But the Electoral College serves another purpose—intended or not—that is either good or bad, depending on your point of view: the Electoral College makes it almost impossible for a third-party candidate to mount a serious challenge to the major party candidates, providing a built-in constitutional shield for the two major parties. Third-party candidates are then left to either make only symbolic campaigns or, in some cases, affect the outcome by drawing off support from either of the two main party candidates.

An attempt to amend the Constitution so as to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with simple direct election of the president was killed in the Senate in 1979. But the issue raises its head every four years, when people look around and wonder why America needs this antiquated contraption that was only created in the first place to deprive the electorate of its power.

What is a caucus?

Presumed to be derived from the Algonquian word
caucauasu
(“one who advises”), the earliest political caucuses were meetings of party leaders to choose candidates and discuss other party business. These caucuses were the first “smoke-filled rooms” in which powerful party bosses determined who the presidential candidates would be.

In modern political parlance, the word “caucus” is inseparably linked with Iowa, scene of the first state caucus of the presidential campaign season. In the Iowa caucuses, party members in small towns meet to stand up and declare for a candidate. The process is not binding and doesn’t select any actual delegates to the national nominating convention, but it has become an early test of a candidate’s strength, and leads to major media visibility. Ever since an obscure Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter won the Iowa caucuses in 1976 and went from “Jimmy who?” to front-runner, the significance of this small group of Iowans has been inflated all out of proportion to its real weight. In the 1988 race, the significance of Iowa dropped a few notches when Representative Richard Gephardt won the Democratic Iowa caucus and then proceeded to disappear from the presidential radar screen. Iowa is really only as significant today as the media make it.

What is a primary?

Unlike a caucus, which is a public meeting, a primary election is essentially a statewide secret nominating ballot in which candidates vie for a share of their party’s delegates to the national convention from that state. The first direct primary was held in Minnesota in 1900, and was soon widely adopted by other states.

The traditional first primary state is New Hampshire, which has made the state a significant testing ground for candidates. Perhaps the most famous New Hampshire primary in recent history occurred in 1968, when Senator Eugene McCarthy lost to President Lyndon B. Johnson, but ran so close a contest that it helped bring about Johnson’s decision not to run and brought Senator Robert Kennedy into the race.

But, as with the caucus in Iowa, New Hampshire’s significance is entirely out of proportion to its population and the number of delegates it actually produces for the winning candidate.

In a series of recent party reforms by both Democrats and Republicans, primary elections have gathered far more weight than they once had in determining candidates. Unlike the old days, when nominees were selected by party insiders who controlled large blocs of delegates, primaries now provide the majority of delegates, allowing a candidate to lock up the nomination well in advance of the nominating convention.

What is a delegate count?

All the caucuses and primaries are aimed at one goal: to accumulate enough delegates to the nominating convention to win the party’s bid to run for president. Before the reforms of the late 1960s and 1970s, most of these delegates were merely political hirelings controlled by party regulars, kingmakers who had the most say in picking a candidate. In recent years the shift to direct selection of delegates to the nominating convention through presidential preference primaries has diluted the strength of power brokers and put far more power into the hands of the electorate.

The delegate count is simply the tally of delegates to the nominating convention committed to a candidate. The candidate with the majority of votes wins the nomination. In past years, few candidates were assured of the party bid before the nominating convention. The drama, suspense, and back room dealing that accompanied dozens of roll call votes at the conventions has been replaced by highly choreographed pageants that basically only affirm the candidate who has gathered sufficient delegates to take the nomination during the primary season. Although party rules are flexible and are constantly changing to suit political moods, the ascendancy of the primaries over the old system of political bosses means the days of the deadlocked nominating convention are probably over.

Appendix 3
U.S. Presidents and Their Administrations

Only ten states actually took part in the first presidential election. The New York legislature did not choose electors; North Carolina and Rhode Island had not yet ratified the Constitution.

Prior to the evolution of a clear two-party system and separate election of the president and vice president, there were often three or four contenders for the presidency, often from the same party. The most famous instance of this came in 1800. Jefferson, who was unofficially his party’s candidate for president, and Burr, both Democratic-Republicans, tied with seventy-three electoral votes. The two opposing Federalist candidates, John Adams and Charles C. Pinckney, trailed with sixty-five and sixty-four, respectively. The election was decided in the House of Representatives in the so-called Revolution of 1800 (see Chapter 3).

This was the first election in which electors voted for president and vice president on separate ballots.

In the 1824 election, there were four legitimate candidates for the presidency: John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and William H. Crawford. Jackson won the most popular and electoral votes, but lacked the majority of electoral votes needed. The election was thrown to the House of Representatives, which went for John Quincy Adams when Clay, a powerful House leader, threw his support to the New Englander in the so-called corrupt bargain.