Party Time

While it got scant attention, the biggest blow in favor of political reform in California in decades may have been struck in San Francisco last week by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. The decision could have a dramatic and beneficial effect on the future of political parties in the state.

The court struck down an 80-year-old California law that barred political parties from endorsing candidates in primary elections. Californians may find this a radical notion in a state where party officials have been required by law to maintain strict neutrality in party primaries.

But in nullifying the law, dating from the Progressive era of Gov. Hiram Johnson, the court called it a form of “paternalism that is inconsistent with the First Amendment.” It also was inconsistent with a complex modern era in which major political factions form and grow around the tangled roots of money and mass-media marketing, with little relation to party positions or philosophy. Party labels are often shunned, even at general-election time, and parties are impotent when it comes to disciplining party members or candidates.

There was a good reason for the law 80 years ago. The political structure in California then was the captive of the Southern Pacific Railroad and allied industrial powers. The only way to wrest political power away from the SP and its friends was to virtually emasculate the parties themselves of any power or influence. In particular, a party without the ability to endorse in primary elections is a party in name only.

What happens next is unclear, but Democratic Party Chairman Peter D. Kelly says, “The potential impact of this is enormous.” In many states, political parties conduct pre-primary election conventions in which candidates for office bid for party support. Usually they must gain the votes of a pre-set percentage of convention delegates before their names can go onto the primary-election ballot for that party’s nomination for office. In some states this cutoff runs as high as 20%.

No one knows whether that sort of system will be adopted in California. Just what does happen is up to the political parties themselves and, most probably, the Legislature. The great potential of the ruling is an infusion of new interest in the party system in California. With the power to endorse, grass-roots political organizations could become important again. The parties could isolate candidates who pretended to be representative of those parties but really were not. Primary-election voters would get guidance as to which candidates had the official sanction of the party organization so that the voters could decide to cast ballots either for them or against them.

Stronger parties might even be able to do something about the obscene cost of political campaigns and make it possible for less-affluent outsider candidates to challenge entrenched politicos and their centralized fund-raising machines. Rather than a handful of legislative leaders bankrolling legislative races and having victors beholden to those leaders personally, the party structure could recapture some control over campaign fund-raising and spending and bring some rationality to the situation.

There is the potential for abuse--a return, for example, to political bossism. Strong political parties need strong leadership and strong local and regional activism. Some escape mechanism would be needed to allow candidates to get onto the primary ballot if they were denied party endorsement in spite of a substantial following among members of the public. But at least the new political bosses could be held accountable to someone other than themselves.

The old Progressive party reforms were designed to deal with a specific evil that existed generations ago. They served their purpose then, but they do not serve a vastly changed California in the late 1980s. Leaders of both major political parties should seize on this opportunity to launch a bright new era of reform in which party symbols, and concepts like party leadership and responsibility, bear real meaning.