THE dream appears to be dead, thank goodness; Newt Gingrich, having failed to achieve orbit velocity in yesterday's debate, is in all likelihood not going to be the Republican nominee for president. This would seem to resolve the discussion in political-science circles over the past few days about whether the current presidential primary fits the accepted model of party elites testing out candidates and settling on a consensus (as laid out in Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel and John Zaller's " The Party Decides "), or whether something else, something more populist and media-driven perhaps, is going on. For a while, during and after the South Carolina primary when Mr Gingrich briefly returned from the dead, it looked as though the party-elite thesis was in trouble, either because it had never been quite right or because something had changed. Even John Sides Jonathan Bernstein and Nate Silver , all largely believers in the party-elite thesis, began to have some doubts. But the model has been reaffirmed by the events of the past couple of days, in which the much-maligned Republican Party establishment rounded on Mr Gingrich and buried him with an avalanche of negative advertising, scarifying op-eds, and, in the case of Bob Dole, whatever the opposite of an "endorsement" is.

What do we think of this, then? It seems as though important figures in the Republican Party, when they feel their interests strongly aligned, can collectively push the opinions of the party's voter base in the direction of the candidate they've settled on, or at least away from a candidate they find unacceptable. Democratic Party elites probably have somewhat less coherence and control, because the party's constituency is more diffuse, but I imagine the same basic model holds. Is this sort of elite control of the nomination process a good thing, or a bad thing? Would we like it if voters were less willing to go along with the party elite's consensus?

I don't really think so. If the party nomination system isn't largely a matter of a contest inside a party elite, then what would it actually look like? There's a fantasy Frank Capra version of such a contest in which a candidate comes along who truly speaks to the hearts of The People, winning them over with sensible positions, honesty, and a minty-fresh smile. In reality, nothing like this is possible, apart from the minty-fresh smile, which every candidate has to have. The actual possibility for a primary selection mechanism that didn't rely on a contest for the endorsement of powerful party players would be an electronic media-based campaign that tried to appeal directly to voters through massive advertising buys, social-media networking, and jiu-jitsu-like manipulation of mainstream media events like debates and interviews to produce shock effects that can outflank the efforts of party elites to spin them. The social-media part of this is a potential gain for society, but in fact we find that successful social-media efforts tend to develop into semi-permanent structures that essentially empower new players who we have to start considering part of the "elite". (See the Netroots and the tea-party movement.) For the rest, nomination efforts that try to leapfrog party elites largely look the way Mr Gingrich's campaign did while he seemed to be managing the trick last week: chaotic, unpredictable, full of slogans and weird stunts, and very nervous-making in terms of what might happen if they succeed. Sarah Palin comes to mind, as well. Overall, I'm happy to have political structures where committed players vie to determine who will best represent their side's interests in the election, and narrow down the choice for the rest of us. Parties are pretty useful things, which is why democracies have them.

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