Primary system is broken

Well that was disappointing. In a year of endless surprises, the New York primary failed to produce even a mild one, hewing instead to what most polls predicted: substantial wins for Trump and Clinton, a tiny bit of a bump for Kasich, and a kick in the pants for Cruz.

So now the Republican party seems headed to a Trumpocalypse, and the Democrats for the nomination of a mainstream candidate whose only novelty is her gender, which at this point seems inconsequential.

What is this world coming to?

Not that long ago, a female Democratic nominee would have been stunning, exciting, historic. Now it’s still historic, but only in a sort of ho-hum way. Angela Merkel has already been there and done that, (and so have women in numerous other countries) so you can’t really stick an “only in America” label on that idea. Plus most of us thought that a woman president would come a long time before we got to have a black president, and we were wrong about that, so somehow breaking the one barrier felt like breaking both of them.

This may not be rational, but hey, this is a presidential campaign, which is not a great venue for rationality.

Trump, however, is truly a novelty. He’s like a train wreck in slow motion: it’s terrifying, unthinkable, and you can’t take your eyes off it, even when you know that watching is going to give you nightmares for weeks. Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham, who once said that the choice between Trump and Cruz was like a choice between being poisoned or shot, actually now concedes that the poison might be preferable, since there is always a possibility that one might find an antidote.

It’s hard to imagine what that antidote might be, other than a last-minute draft of House Speaker Paul Ryan, which would light the whole Republican house on fire. That would give Graham three choices: poisoned, shot or incinerated.

And then, of course, there are the stalwart Sanders utopians, who will soldier on, working against the weight of Citizens United, the Democratic party establishment and the vagaries of a delegate selection process designed to stop the kind of peasant uprising he leads.

Here in Washington, the Democrats made a complete hash of the caucus process, leaving many who tried to participate in chaotic, disorganized meetings angry and disillusioned.

Republicans were quick to point out that their party’s system — which assigns at least some delegates based on the May primary election — is more democratic than the Democrats’.

Given the wackiness of this entire enterprise, it’s no wonder that an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll found that the majority of us can’t see ourselves voting for Clinton (58 percent no), Trump (68 percent no) or Cruz (61 percent no). Sanders came in with 49 percent saying they could support him and 48 percent saying they couldn’t. And he’s the least likely to make it through the primary process.

Clearly, it’s time to throw out our entire primary election system, and design a consistent, national, democratic method that lets all American voters choose candidates for our nation’s highest office.

This story was originally published April 21, 2016 at 9:19 PM with the headline "Primary system is broken."