Bring Back the Smoke-Filled Rooms? The campaign-finance laws have made the presidential selection process a self-destructive mess. Eliminate the limits on individual donations.

By DANIEL HENNINGER

In what all say is an "historic" election, the GOP is fielding its B team while the A team sits in the locker room. Since when does that win the big games?
Mitt Romney, stuck forever at 25%, has been a front-runner out of a Henny Youngman joke. Take my candidate—please. Gov. Romney has been such a front-runner that virtually any new face in the race momentarily catches him—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry and now even an old face, Newt Gingrich.
The question asked everywhere is, Why is this the field? How did it come to this? Desperate questions bring desperate answers, such that I have been overheard mumbling of late: "Maybe it's time to bring back the smoke-filled rooms."
This was the nearly mythical system of selection in which party leaders and party bosses gathered over cigars, bourbon and branch to pick a candidate "who could win." The most famous smoke-filled room pick was William McKinley, anointed for the 1896 election by Ohio kingmaker Mark Hanna (though in fact Hanna got McKinley nominated over the opposition of GOP party bosses).

Dan Henninger on why repealing campaign finance laws could improve the crop of presidential candidates.

While I merely grumbled, my former Wall Street Journal colleague Robert W. Merry explicitly wrote "Bring Back Those Smoke-Filled Rooms" last month on the website of the National Interest magazine, which he edits. Notwithstanding distaste for the politicians picking candidates, he wrote, "consider the dangers inherent in our system now, when candidates emerge based on their own judgment of their overwhelming talents and virtues, rather than those of their political peers, and when the vetting process has been truncated to a point where it relies on happenstance to save the system from people nobody really knows and who may be hiding serious flaws"—he was writing about Herman Cain—"that add up to political liabilities. It was a pretty good system we had in the old days."

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Chad Crowe Notwithstanding that smoke-filled rooms are banned everywhere now, a serious problem remains: The refusal today of the best candidates to answer the call. Paul Ryan, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush were all heavily recruited by insiders and donors to get in the race. No dice.
Against this, one might argue that the Republicans merely are having bad luck with the election cycle. The off-year elections produced some of the best GOP politicians in years, but none are ready for 2012. The list includes Gov. Christie obviously but also Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Bob McDonnell of Virginia or GOP Senate freshmen Rob Portman of Ohio, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, and Marco Rubio of Florida.
But what if 2016 arrives, and they still won't run? Jon Huntsman says you have to be more than a little "nuts" to run for president. A willing Mitch Daniels dropped out at his family's insistence. And no wonder. 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.
A system that drives out the best over time will drive down the country. There has to be a better way.
There is: Dismantle the presidential campaign-finance laws. For anyone normal, the federal fund-raising limitations are an overwhelming deterrent to running for the presidency. They are smothering good candidates in the crib.
No fiddling at the margins here. The solution is to go radical: Let any individual donor give as much money as he or she wants to any candidate—with full, immediate public disclosure.
Free yourself of the siren song of full public financing. It's not going to happen. Great cost is now part of the DNA of presidential campaigns, which have entered an era of unstoppably proliferating, for-profit media platforms.
Raising tens of millions of dollars in the small, individual giving limit of $2,400, often with daily phone calls from the candidates themselves, is exhausting and humiliating. Jack Kemp, who made a run in 1988, and Colin Powell reportedly refused to do it. The system is terrifying for anyone of modest means. A serious, informed candidate like Tim Pawlenty quits rather than risk massive personal debt. Why are there so many "debates" now? Because they are little more than a free-media chance to drive more fund raising.
These laws have broken the link between candidates and experienced party leaders who do know the difference between a long-haul competitor and the flavor of the week. Indeed, the parties are now little more than a vehicle to get on the ballot.
The reformers' great horror is candidacies funded and "controlled" by a George Soros from the left or you-know-who from the right. Nonsense. Available research—and a moment's thought—suggests this fear is wildly overblown. The reformers should wake up and smell the 21st century's inescapable transparency. The 1% have nowhere to hide.
The current presidential-selection process is a self-destructive mess, for both parties. Make the fund raising simpler. Eliminate limits on individual donations. Get the parties back in the game. Give better candidates a chance to compete. Save a country in peril. What more could you want?