The Democratic Party is having a compound panic attack.
Democrats rightly fear that President Biden is heading for certain defeat in November if he stays on the ticket, as doubts about his age and declining mental faculties have broken out to the electorate.
But even if he agrees to stand down, the panic shifts to the dilemma that Vice President Kamala Harris is thought to be an equally weak candidate — and replacing both Biden and Harris with a new ticket risks chaos and perhaps worse disaster for Democrats.
To be sure, Democrats have good reasons to fear chaos and intra-party division.
Although former president Barack Obama is said to privately favor an “open convention” to pick a new presidential candidate, there is no clear process in place for a major party to replace a nominee this late in the election cycle: The rules would have to be made up on the fly.
But Democrats may have the matter backwards.
Instead of fearing the risks of the unknown, they should consider an open convention as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change American politics for the better.
Doing so requires a fresh retrospective on their own history.
The Democrats’ apprehension arises from the memory of the last time an incumbent president stood down — Lyndon Johnson in 1968 — and was replaced with a candidate chosen by party bosses.
The party infighting at that year’s Chicago convention (as well as the rioting outside) is thought to have doomed the chosen nominee, then-veep Hubert Humphrey, who lost narrowly to Richard Nixon that fall.
With Democrats meeting by coincidence again in Chicago next month, party elders are having a déjà vu moment, fearing a repeat of that disaster.
If Democrats look further back into their history, however, they might see a way of correcting some of their modern mistakes.
Very few Democrats alive today have first-hand memory of the last time a Democratic convention selected a nominee from scratch in 1952, when Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson was chosen on the third ballot after a lot of backroom maneuvering in legendary “smoke-filled rooms.”
Stevenson had been genuinely “drafted” off the bench after party leaders rejected the candidate who had won several of that year’s few primaries, Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver.
Despite his successes, leading Democrats thought Kefauver a certain loser who lacked the experience and gravitas to be president.
Republicans in 1952 had just done the same thing in drafting Dwight Eisenhower over “Mr. Conservative” Robert Taft, also after a lot of backroom wheeling and dealing.
In the decades since, the old method of selecting presidential nominees — at caucuses of party insiders and in smoke-filled rooms at national conventions — has come to be seen as corrupt and undemocratic.
But that method brought us strong candidates and distinguished presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, not to mention Ike.
Under the old discredited method, party bosses selected candidates they thought would have the broadest electoral appeal along with the ability to serve effectively in the presidency.
Of course this involved compromises and the balancing of geographical and political interests, but it resulted in both parties’ long records of selecting eminent men for the nation to choose between.
A return to the smoke-filled-room method of selecting a nominee would help remedy one the principal causes of the dysfunction, polarization and gridlock of our politics today: weak national parties.
The post-1968 nomination reforms relying on popular-vote primaries that Democrats adopted and Republicans soon copied brought us the political scene we have today, with majorities of Americans disliking both party candidates, cycle after cycle.
“Reform” has empowered narrower party bases and elevated special interest groups over the general voting public.
George McGovern, the first Democratic candidate selected under the new process, who then lost 49 states, later regretted that his campaign had been dominated by insurgent special interests.
Democrats have the opportunity to reverse this slow decay at a stroke, while generating excitement for a new face for November.
Even if there’s no smoking in the “smoke-filled room” of today, Democrats — as Harris herself might say — should imagine what could be, unburdened by what mistakes have been made before.
Steven F. Hayward is the Edward Gaylord Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy.