RUTHFULLY YOURS

Beware the zeal of the reformer. True, the reform impulse has occupied a long and sometimes necessary place in American politics, going back to Andrew Jackson’s fiery allegation that John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay stole the 1824 presidential election through a “corrupt bargain.” Four years later, Jackson rode to the White House on the wings of the outrage he had summoned. His refrain—that malefactors of power had undermined American democracy by thwarting the will of the people—has probably been the most catalytic recurrent theme in the country’s politics. Even when the flames of populist passion subside, they seem ever-present through a kind of after-burner of latent protest.

Yet the political reforms generated by these passions often go awry, producing unintended consequences. Sometimes they fall victim to the vicissitudes of human nature and the reality that politics is rarely about good guys versus bad guys. Reformers are human, and often when power comes their way their frailties are exposed.
Let The People Rule

By Geoffrey Cowan
Norton, 404 pages, $27.95

A particularly potent period of reformist zeal followed the tumultuous campaign year of 1968, when activist Democrats infuriated by the Vietnam War flooded the early presidential primary states and obliterated President Lyndon Johnson’s hopes for a second full term. For their pains they got, instead, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who embraced Johnson’s war policy and cadged his party’s nomination without having entered a single primary. The reformist refrain went up: The party’s nomination process was dominated by backroom bosses who exercised power without regard to voter sentiment.

The reformist answer was to revise party rules in order to encourage states to select national convention delegates through primaries rather than boss-controlled caucuses and state conventions. The result was the nominating system we have today, with generally 80% of national convention delegates selected through primaries.

The nation tuned in to Round Six of the Republican debate mashup Thursday night, and the media is busy micro-covering every last rift between the GOP candidates. In the process reporters are ignoring the far more interesting party crackup going on.

You might not know it, but the Democratic Party is in the middle of an internecine battle that potentially dwarfs that of conservatives. On one side is a real but weakened mainstream Democratic movement that has its roots in Clinton centrism. On the other is a powerful, ascendant wing of impatient and slightly unhinged progressive activists. This split has been building for years, but The Donald has been so entertaining that few have noticed.

Now it’s getting hard to ignore. Polls this week show Bernie Sanders tying or beating Hillary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire. Put another way, a self-declared socialist, a man who makes many think of their crazy uncle Bob, is beating a woman who spent eight years planning this run, who is swimming in money, and who oversees the most powerful political machine in operation.

Some of Mrs. Clinton’s struggles are self-imposed. She’s a real-world, political version of Pig-Pen, trailing along her own cloud of scandal dust. Even Democrats who like her don’t trust her. And a lot of voters are weary or unimpressed by the Clinton name. For all the Democratic establishment’s attempts to anoint Mrs. Clinton—to shield her from debates and ignore her liabilities—the rank and file aren’t content to have their nominee dictated.

Shortly after a conservative website on Wednesday posted 2008 footage of Sen. Marco Rubio backing a cap-and-trade program to combat climate change, his campaign roared back with a counterattack that included an entire web page aimed at debunking the video.

Mr. Rubio’s muscular response revealed how toxic the issue of climate change has become in the Republican Party under President Barack Obama, who has sought to make reducing carbon emissions to alleviate global warming one of his signature accomplishments.

As speaker of the Florida House, Mr. Rubio did vote for a 2008 bill authorizing the state to come up with rules for a cap-and-trade plan, though he raised questions about its cost and effectiveness. A press release from the House Majority Office at the time described the bill as a “responsible response to concerns about global climate change.”

But since running for U.S. Senate in 2010 as the conservative alternative to then-Gov. Charlie Crist, Mr. Rubio has questioned whether climate change is man-made, and opposed potential remedies like cap-and-trade that he says would hurt the economy.

Shifts by Mr. Rubio and some of his rivals on the issue recall an inconvenient past that many in the GOP would like to forget: Republicans, not Democrats, first championed market-based systems to control pollution, as a way to avoid more direct regulation.

Until 2008, many Republicans, including then-presidential nominee John McCain, supported cap-and-trade to address climate change. Once Mr. Obama won the White House, Republicans swiftly unified against nearly all of his initiatives, including a cap-and-trade bill that would have set limits on carbon emissions and allowed companies to trade pollution credits to comply.