Fix the presidential nomination system

This week and the next, the two dominant political parties will nominate the least popular major-party nominees in modern political history. Many Republican leaders are appalled that their party's nomination has been hijacked (legally and within the rules but hijacked nonetheless) by a man with no electoral experience and no real allegiance to his party's principles and viewpoint. Democrats next week will nominate Hillary Clinton, who is despised by many Americans and distrusted by a majority of the electorate.

A majority of Americans wish they had some other options on election day.

Where did we go wrong?

Perhaps it's time to reconsider the steady shift from party elites making the rules and picking the nominees to a series of party primaries illustrated by numerous nationally televised candidate "debates." This new system was born out of efforts to correct the excesses within both parties in the 1960s. Republicans wanted to avoid another debacle like the 1964 election, when Lyndon Johnson, one of the least likable candidates of the century, swamped the GOP's Barry Goldwater in the most one-sided election in modern history. Democrats wanted to involve the masses and avoid the violent demonstrations that wrecked the 1968 Chicago convention and handed the election to Richard Nixon.

In 1968, Hubert Humphrey could win the nomination without even entering a party primary. Most delegate votes were decided by party officials, not by rank-and-file voters. Reforms enacted for the 1972 election reversed that. Primaries would determine the party nomination, so the Democrats got George McGovern, a one-issue candidate who motivated primary voters to his cause but had little appeal in the general election.

Then came the debates. Kennedy and Nixon held the first presidential debates in 1960, then the format was abandoned for several years. Only in the 1980s did candidate debates become standard fare. Ronald Reagan thrived in the debates while his opponents stumbled. Voters swooned. The precedent was set.

This year's crop of 17 GOP candidates made candidate debates a three-ring circus, not a debate; nevertheless, the candidates and the networks promoted the events, and voters watched. The staged free-for-alls handed the party a leading candidate who was not informed on major national and international issues and whose debate style was insults, bombast and bragging.

On the Democratic side, potential candidates declined to take on Clinton, the presumptive party nominee since 2009. But Clinton was a weaker nominee than potential challengers realized. Only Bernie Sanders, a socialist with little allegiance to the Democratic Party, was willing to reveal Clinton as an unlikable and untrustworthy candidate.

No matter how the general election turns out, both parties should be willing to rethink the nomination process. There has to be a better way. Primaries that begin nearly two years before the election are not useful, especially when the first primaries are in states with demographics unlike the nation at large. Debates among a dozen or more candidates aren't helpful in determining who is best qualified to run the country, especially when questions to candidates are more focused on personal traits or foibles than national issues. The parties should retake possession of the debates. They should find a better way to hold primaries. A single, nationwide primary has been suggested. That might help. Primaries that go on week after week for more than a year are guaranteed to put short-attention-span voters to sleep.

This election year may have to be a write-off, but let's fix this mess before the next presidential election.

Another divisive political year

Has America ever been more divided?

As the presidential election looms five months in the future, the normal divisions between conservatives and liberals, Democrats and Republicans, men and women, young and old, seem broader and more hopeless than ever. Political rallies turn into riots. Candidates and their supporters use words that are more suited to a middle school playground than to political debate. A national campaign against "bullying" in schools has shifted to a celebration of bullying on the campaign trail.

In 1968, America was more divided than at any time in a century. Two wildly popular leaders (one a presidential candidate) were assassinated in a span of two months. The Democratic convention in Chicago was besieged by street protests that turned into riots as police brutally beat back the protesters. The presidential election was razor close and failed to eliminate political differences. After the 1969 inauguration, the "Silent Majority" counter-marched against anti-war protesters. Hundreds of thousands filled the streets of the nation's capital as they attempted to stop the government from functioning and force an end to the Vietnam War.

This year's rallies and riots have not reached 1968's scale, but the battlegrounds have shifted. Today's animosities are played out on Facebook, Twitter and other social media on the Internet. The comments are no less angry, no less vile and no less myopic. The Internet has helped broaden the political divide as digital users select the bombastic opinions they agree with and rarely ever have to read facts, if the facts are even available in the places they look. They never have to read contrary opinion

This year, we have a presidential candidate who bans seasoned news organizations from his speeches. Other candidates or supporters compare a candidate to the worst tyrants in history.

An educational system that "deconstructs" great literature to discover its prejudices and that destroys great leaders of history for failing to follow the mores of a society 200 years after the leaders' deaths is partly to blame for a political system that equates celebrity with competence.

This year is not the worst election year in history. 1968 was worse in many ways. 1860, however, takes the prize for a divisiveness that even 600,000 deaths could not mend.

Forty-eight years ago, another divisive election

This is the eve of an election primary day like none I have seen in nearly 50 years. Forty-eight years ago, in 1968, America faced an election that was tearing the nation apart. Lyndon Johnson, who had pushed through more consequential legislation than any president since FDR but who had become a pariah to many voters because of the Vietnam War, chose not to run for a second full term — a decision validated by his death as his successor's term expired.

Johnson's surprise withdrawal from the race, opened the door for challenger Gene McCarthy and, belatedly, for Bobby Kennedy, who was in many ways Johnson's nemesis.

Republicans were trying to recover from the debacle of Barry Goldwater's humiliating defeat in 1964. Richard Nixon, the former vice president and 1960 presidential candidate who couldn't win the California governorship, was the improbable Republican front-runner.

Seething emotions on both sides ripped the fragile fabric of America. An assassin's bullet ended Kennedy's candidacy and crushed the hopes of millions of younger voters. In Chicago that summer, establishment Democrats would align behind Hubert Humphrey, who carried the awful yoke of being Lyndon Johnson's vice president and heir. Riots would disrupt the Democratic Convention, which would adjourn amid seething anger within the party.

Meanwhile, Nixon would campaign not as the anti-communist warrior he had been early in his career but as the candidate who would "bring us together." But his election strategy, which depended upon winning Southern states still rebelling against Johnson's civil rights legislation and the tectonic changes those laws brought to the former Confederacy, made it clear that Nixon's path to election was built on dividing the country into groups that could support him. As president, he would cultivate support from the "Silent Majority" of people angry over war protesters, rising inflation and a too-liberal Supreme Court.

This year, we see the same seething anger and the same divisions of the electorate. We see some of the sort of violence seen outside the Chicago convention hall in the summer of 1968. This year, social media and other communications changes make the anger more mobile and powerful and the demagoguery more persuasive. If anything, the voters of 2016 are more gullible and more easily fooled by slick campaign tactics.

We who remember the election of 1968 don't want to relive it.

If Sirhan Sirhan had been stopped, what the world might have been

I dragged myself out of bed the morning of June 5, 1968, and turned on the television — something I wouldn't normally do — but I wanted to find out what happened in the California presidential primary. I was home from my first year of college and had not yet started a summer job. The newscast left me confused. Instead of reciting the primary results, the reporters were all gathered around a hospital, talking of wounds and prognosis and hopes. It took me a while to realize that they were talking about a shooting that had happened hours earlier in a back hallway at the Ambassador Hotel. Sen. Robert Kennedy lay gravely wounded with a bullet to the head. He would survive less than a day.

Forty-five years later, I wonder at how different the world might have been if someone had stopped Sirhan Sirhan in that hallway, taken away his pistol and stopped the nightmare. Could Kennedy have rested the Democratic nomination away from Vice President Hubert Humphrey? Late getting into the race, Kennedy had won a string of primaries and had instigated a wave of enthusiasm and hope — hope that the Kennedy legacy, cut short five years earlier in Dallas, might be revived.

But the odds were long. Party pols still controlled the nomination process, and they weren't lining up behind Bobby. The president, Lyndon Johnson, hated Bobby, and the feeling was mutual. Would the Chicago Democratic Convention have been as chaotic if Kennedy had been there to give an outlet to the many rank-and-file who felt left out and ignored? Could the Democrats have coalesced around Bobby and denied Richard Nixon his slim victory?

And if Bobby had become president, what might have transpired in Vietnam, in civil rights and in every other issue of the day? Would Bobby have launched a new investigation of the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination, an investigative panel not appointed by LBJ, whom Bobby, according to some reports, thought had a hand in the murder?

These are questions that cry out for an alternative history — a fictionalized account of what might have been, of what could have been, of what many people dreamed would happen.