Bring back the smoke-filled room?

“Instead of a candidate-vetting process carried out quietly by party leaders, it's now done randomly by a Hydra-headed national media. Any flaw or past stumble is metastasized into a public nightmare for spouses and children. So they say No. In their place we get mysterious candidates who have wandered in from Nowhere Land or obscure state senate seats.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204012004577070181779013756.html

(The debates don’t do a damn bit of good. We get “Whoozis?” candidates, TV gets more ad money, dig-deeper sleaze mongers rake around in the muck trying to find somebody somewhere who will remember the time a hope-to-be candidate did something that could have, might have been something he or she was not supposed to do or say or think or tell a joke about. It’s OK for President Clinton to present himself to a White House intern, but oh good grief this black Republican once worked around white women, so he must have done something. I mean, you know how they are.

(The 1960 Democratic presidential campaign was the first I paid attention to. Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts won the majority of the party primaries, but a few weeks before the convention Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas announced his candidacy for the nomination. When the convention began in Los Angeles, no candidate had a majority of delegates. Kennedy got the nomination, but historycentral.com says, “1960 represented the last time there was true drama in a Democratic convention. Since 1960 the outcomes of the conventions have been known in advance.” http://www.historycentral.com/elections/Conventions/1960DEM.html

(Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt disagreed with that statement, calling the convention “turbulent--but prearranged …”) http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/mep/displaydoc.cfm?docid=jfk40