Politics and elections 87aldine Ferraro in 1984 as the first woman candidate for the vice-presidency
clearly represented an attempt, unsuccessful as it proved, by the Democrats
to attract a larger proportion of female voters. As we shall see, Vice-President
Cheney has played a more important role in the administrations of President
George W. Bush than was the case with any previous vice-president.
The campaign and the Electoral College
The dispersal of the national conventions brings to an end the long and ex-
hausting process of selection for which the candidates have been planning,
working and campaigning for months, even for years. After a short pause the
general election begins, with its even more intensive and exhausting cam-
paign, building up over eight or nine weeks to the climax of election day
itself, on the day after the first Monday in November. The American people
will then give their final verdict upon those who aspire to the presidency;
yet the way in which the campaign is conducted, and the very nature of the
institution of the presidency itself, depend upon the electoral machinery de-
vised by the Founding Fathers in 1787. For, just as the strategy of presidential
nominating politics is determined by the need to obtain an absolute majority
of the votes at the convention, so the strategy of the presidential campaign is
determined by the need to obtain an absolute majority of votes in the Elec-
toral College. Although Americans vote for their president early in Novem-
ber, and usually a few hours after the polls close the result of the election is
common knowledge, it is not until a month has passed that the election of the
president actually takes place, when the members of the Electoral College
cast their votes. Although in itself this procedure is usually a formality, hardly
noticed by the world, it is, nevertheless, a procedure that has a profound ef-
fect upon the way in which presidential elections are conducted, upon the
strategy of the candidates’ campaign managers, and upon the type of candi-
date who is chosen for the presidency.
At the end of the eighteenth century the Fathers of the Constitution
wished to isolate the election of the president from the turbulence of ‘mob
politics’. They were creating an elective head of state at a time when demo-
cratic government was virtually untried – in France Louis XVI was still on the
throne, Hohenzollern and Habsburg dominated Europe, and even in England
a hereditary aristocracy ruled in collaboration with a still influential king and
a corrupt and unrepresentative House of Commons. The Americans were
embarking upon a great adventurous experiment, but they wished to be cau-
tious also, and not to give this potentially powerful office over to demagogues.
They provided, therefore, for a system of indirect election for the presidency.
They created an Electoral College, in which each state was to have a number
of votes equal to the number of Senators and Representatives to which it was
entitled in Congress. The state legislatures would determine how the Elec-
tors were to be chosen, and the Electors would then choose a president from
among the men most suited for the position, remote from the white heat of a