U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer wrote a guest column Tuesday for the New York Times arguing the glorious notion that we should do away with party primaries.
He recommended that we replace these party-restricted nominating exercises with open blanket primaries.
All candidates of all parties would run together on the same primary ballot for the consideration of all voters. The top two vote-getters, regardless of partisan label, would proceed to the general election.
Louisiana has done it that way for a long time. Now California has switched.
Your instinctive reaction may be that those are the last states to emulate; that the proposal sounds radical, perhaps goofy.
So I'll put it the way state Rep. Nate Steel of Nashville, the Democratic nominee for attorney general, put it to me Tuesday: "Do you think a representative ought to represent all the people all the time, or just some of the people some of the time?"
Steel said we'd get better government, or at least better legislating, from open blanket primaries.
The thinking is that politicians would govern better if they could pander less.
Steel said that legislative holdouts against voting for the private-option form of Medicaid expansion, probably the best policy to come out of the state Legislature in a generation, tended to be Republicans who were worried mostly, or only, about "getting primar-ied."
That means opposed from the extreme right in a restricted, marginalized and inordinately influential party primary.
A big problem in American politics today--the biggest problem other than obscene amounts of money--is the out-of-context power of the polar extremes within the artificially small universes of the two political parties.
So the solution is to blow that up.
We've seen how party blending toward the political center can facilitate good government.
Davy Carter, a Republican, became speaker of the state House of Representatives by getting a few fellow Republicans to join all Democratic House members in voting for him.
From that came the private option. From that came pragmatic government.
From that came success.
Steel actually introduced a bill last year to impose blanket open primaries. He jokingly called it the "Davy Carter Relief Act" because it would have enhanced Carter's now-abandoned gubernatorial ambitions.
Steel said he got encouragement along the way from mainstream Republican business leaders in Northwest Arkansas. They tend to lament the strength of extreme Tea Party Republicans in primaries in that part of the state.
That strength would be sapped a bit if Democrats could vote in an open primary, perhaps for the mainstream conservative as the lesser of evils because no Democrat had a reasonable chance anyway.
Steel also picked up the co-sponsorship of state Rep. Jeremy Gillam of Judsonia, who now is the speaker-elect.
Yet the bill died unceremoniously.
In his guest column, Schumer cited what Mississippians fashioned a couple of weeks ago: They formed a pragmatic coalition of mainstream Republicans and black Democrats to sustain U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran against a Tea Party insurgent in the Republican primary.
Schumer also noted that one of Washington's most-conservative Republican leaders, Eric Cantor, got beat in his own primary in Virginia. One reason was that he was comically deemed insufficiently conservative for the Republicans who chose to vote in that primary.
A congressional climate already poisoned will be made implausibly more toxic by replacing Cantor with someone so extreme as to find him too moderate.
I think of two of my favorite Arkansas Republicans--state Reps. Duncan Baird of Lowell and John Burris of Harrison.
The eminently qualified and ethical Baird lost the state treasurer's nomination to a laughable opponent. The smart Burris lost a state Senate nomination in Baxter and Boone counties to a laughable opponent.
In open primaries, Baird and Burris would have led the ticket. They would be well on their way to substantial general-election victories.
State government would be more competent and less laughable come January.
All of the people, rather than some of the people, would have been given a democratic voice.
Who in Arkansas gets the losing end of open blanket primaries? That would be Tea Partiers.
And there I triumphantly rest my case.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 07/24/2014