Today it would have to be a non-smoke filled room.

Each method has advantages and drawbacks. Parties can avoid certain types of mistakes, as noted, but they also develop blind spots about what their voters really think.

In the short run, democracy is always less efficient - in the medium and long run, always more efficient.

Smoke-filled rooms begatting better presidents? Such as Warren G. Harding and Benjamin Harrison?

Like AVI said, each method has its advantages and drawbacks. In the Dems case, its the proportional system of allocating delegates that's sinking them. (Does someone know what it would be like if they used the winner-take-all system?)

Direct popular election of Senators (17th Amendment, 1913 - a high point of the original "Progressive Era") hasn't worked out particularly well, either.

Donna,

I am not convinced that democracy is always more efficient in the long run. I would be hard-pressed to come up with a better system off the top of my head, but that does not mean that such a system does not exist.

Democracy has a number of well-known flaws—the greatest of which is that it is crucially dependent on the prudence and acumen of the greater part of the populace. Should voters systematically prefer bad policy, they will eventually get bad policy no matter how many patriotic, intelligent statesmen they have to crush first.

Direct election of Senators destroyed a check-and-balance between the States and the Federal Government. It is actually a bad thing,

Not only do there not have to be primaries, there doesn't have to be a popular election for President. it is the States, through the Electors, that choose the President, not the people. It is just tradition that all of the States use a popular election to choose their Electors. The Electors could be chosen by the State Legislatures in smoked filled rooms if the Legislatures so chose.

AVI asks ... Does someone know what it would be like if they used the winner-take-all system?

Hillary Clinton would have already won the nomination. This assumes the same number of votes in the primaries and giving all caucus electoral votes to the caucus winners. This is true even awarding Obama all delegates from "Democrats Abroad" and the territories that get Democratic convention delegates. (In the general election, only states and DC get electoral votes.)

It assumes Clinton wins Texas, which had a mixed primary-caucus system. Clinton got more votes, but Obama did better in the caucus. If you give Texas to Obama, then the race would still be undecided at this point.

Mastiff, on this blog, comments aren't boxed together with their author-label. They alternate comment/label; comment/label.

It was Assistant Village Idiot who made the comment to which you are referring. (Yeah, I've made the same mistake here.)

Hey, at least when we respond to the wrong guy, we know we've made a mistake. AVI here hasn't defined terms "democracy" and "efficient", which makes his comment Not Even Wrong. When he learns to say something that rises to the level of "wrong" then maybe his village will consider him for that promotion...

The primary system is a good way to weed out candidates who might go nutty under the stress of the presidency. It isn't designed to produce a good president, but it guarantees that we won't get a bad one.
I have no proof of this. Going back over the years, I can remember the following candidates who may have been elected but who were, in one way or another, tripped up by the primary system:

Ummm ... Go Elitism!?!

"Today it would have to be a non-smoke filled room."

Don't be ridiculous. Those rules are for the little people, not for party bosses. The backrooms would undoubtedly be filled with smoke. The only question is, what kind? In the case of the Democrats, it would undoubtedly be marijuana smoke.

damn machine...press some key somewhere and all of a sudden the screen goes wild and the message gets lost...
...to continue my earlier post of 2:03 p.m., April 24, 2008:
There have been numerous presidential candidates who had a good chance of getting elected when some primary event stopped them cold. There was George Romney in 1968, who admitted to being brainwashed about Vietnam and disappeared into the mists of history; Edmund Muskie in 1972, with his "melting snowflakes" performance (then there was Thomas Eagleton, also in 1972, admitting his psychiatric problems; I'm not really counting this, though, since he was just a candidate for V.P.); Ted Kennedy in 1980, demonstrating in TV interviews that he was unable to form complete sentences under pressure; Gary Hart in 1984, daring the press to investigate him; and Howard Dean in 2004, gracefully accepting defeat in Iowa.
These guys were all effectively weeded out by the primary system, wherein self-inflicted wounds quickly go gangrenous. Does anyone out there believe that any of them would have made good presidents? (This is not a rhetorical question; some of them might conceivably have done a good job.)If not, then the system works.

"I am not convinced that democracy is always more efficient in the long run."

Democracy is terribly INefficient. For getting things done quickly and with a minumum of fuss, you really can't beat a dictatorship.

Fortunately, our Founding Fathers were not concerned with efficiency when they designed our political system. They were more interested in liberty.

The primary system introduces extra money and cultish followers into the game. We'd be better off if that money was spent in the general election and if the cultists were ignored.

"In the case of the Democrats, it would undoubtedly be marijuana smoke."

Hardly. Elite Dems smoke the same expensive cigars that elite Repubs smoke. It is us little people who are stuck with Swisher Sweets.

The Assistant Village Idiot speaks of democracy, but is the system of primaries really democracy in operation or the mere simulated appearance of democracy?

Also, are caucuses attended mostly by political junkies (normal people have a life and do entertaining things in their leisure time, like go bowling) and low turn-out primary balloting the right tool for the job of picking a political party's nominees? Like Eric, I'm doubtful.

Warren G. Harding is unfairly underrated as a President, more than a little because the lovers of Wilsonian policies were upset that Harding dismantled them. Were I arguing against the smoke-filled room of lore, I'd have used Wilson as the negative example for he was a huge threat to American liberties. As for Howard Dean being weeded out in the 2004 Democrat primaries, just look at who they weeded-in -- that is refutation enough that the system of primary elections produces better nominees.

The collapse of the 2-party system can be blamed first and foremost on the "Campaign Finance Reform" of the 1970s. These laws stripped the parties of their function in selecting and promoting candidates and put the task on the backs of the candidates and their supporters themselves - meaning that if YOUR supporters have more money than MY supporters, you win and I lose. Fundraising (aka "butt-kissing") consumes 50%-80% of most congresscritters' time now and they have little or no loyalty to the political parties they represent - in fact just the opposite; a party that doesn't kowtow to a well-monied PAC risks watching it pick up its ball and go home.

The up-side to the old smoke-filled room days was that the people making the decisions were professionals who knew what made a successful politician and what didn't. The three remaining (surviving?) candidates today probabably wouldn't have made the cut in the Bad Old Days. I wouldn't be unhappy if they hadn't.

Dictatorships are highly efficient at delivering whatever the dictator wants. Overall efficiency? Not so much.

Republics work because they are the best system we've come up with for aligning the interests of leaders with the interests of citizens, without the erratic behavior of a direct democracy.

Sounds like the political version of the 'Moral Hazards' argument you hear bantered about in financial circles.... But I don't think the issue is one of which room it occurs in. The issue is that under the current environment there is NO vetting occurring at all at the National or State party levels anymore. Had Dean issued oppo research on Obama he never would have made it out of Iowa.

Numbers don't lie, when the Democrats instituted new rules in '72, they had held the white house for 24 of the previous 36
years. For the subsequent period since the new rules they've held the office for 12 of the last 36 years. From 2/3 to 1/3; the nomination process has something to do with it. Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry, and the near miss with Dean.

Florida is currently in a budget crisis (I'm sure the same could be said for a few dozen other states). I wonder if they could have said, "Sorry, we're not having a primary. The party leaders in the state legislature will pick all the delegates. Talk to them about which candidate to support."

Would they have still had those delegates stripped if the legislature announced (or leaked) their choice(s) in late January? in March?

Basically I'm wondering about whether a state could unilaterally go 'smoke-filled room'. They probably could.

I also dislike the primary system and campaign finance reform, but these are in my view just ancillary issues. Everybody knows that it costs a lot of money to become a major party candidate, but why? Eisenhower ran and won twice, and I doubt that he spent much of his or other people's money to do so.

The reason is that the media has turned the Presidential race into a continuous three-ring circus. It used to be that the race didn't begin until Labor Day, and lasted about 2 months. The current election cycle has been going on since at least 2004, and arguably since 2000, and I don't even want to think about the number of nabob-hours that have been consumed in the process.

A candidate needs to raise a lot of money to last that long. Why should it be so? It would make perfect sense to go back to the old-style campaigns -- at least that way there would be more potential candidates.

Put aside whatever preconceived notions you may have and ask yourselves who benefitted the most from McCain-Feingold? The media, that's who. And who lost the most? The voters, that's who. And who pays for primary elections? The taxpayers, that's who. How else did the media get such a chokehold on the election process?

ManekiNeko; a thousand times, Amen! Given a choice, I'm inclined to axe the the Seventheenth over the Sixteenth any day.

The Constitution is basically a contract between the States covering what they agree to as a federal government on behalf of their citizenry. The Seventeenth removed the representation of the States in the federal government. Amongst the power struggle between the three branches an underappreciated check and balance used to exist between the House and Seante, as the House would seek to pander to its constituency through largess and the Senate would seek to please its by restricting federal encroachment. Now noone in Congress has a designed existential motivator to reign in growth of the federal government.