JIM LEHRER: Do you think the Democrats should rethink winner-take-all, I mean, rethink the proportional thing and go back to winner-take-all?MARK SHIELDS: Well, yes, I do. It came for a very simple thing. In the 1968 Democratic convention, the middle of the Vietnam War, the insurgent campaigns of Gene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, three-quarters of the delegates had been chosen for that convention two years before, so there wasn't an open process.
And what they said was, "We have to open this process," but they also mandated that the delegations be half men and half women. And so it became easier to have primaries than to have caucuses, because they found out the conventions wouldn't challenge the results of an open primary.
So primaries took -- but, yes, proportional representation makes no sense when there's two candidates. One of them is going to get 50 percent. I mean, so what's the point of proportional?
If you don't get a majority in a democracy -- yes, if there's seven candidates in there and somebody gets 15 percent, you can make an argument that people get representation, but there's only -- it's down to Clinton and Obama. If you win, you ought to get the delegates.
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree or disagree with Mr. Shields?
DAVID BROOKS: I basically agree. It does have the effect of pushing everything along, so it lengthens out the process. And if you like the long process, then proportional representation does lengthen it out.
That has pros and cons. It means it's probably bad for the party who want to unify behind a candidate, and it's probably bad for the candidates, because they're all exhausted. But it's probably good for people in the late states.
JIM LEHRER: And in this particular case, the specifics of tonight very much are affected by the fact that it's winner-take-all more on the Republicans than it is the Democrats. That's why we're talking about the possibility of John McCain winning tonight, winning the whole thing.
DAVID BROOKS: Absolutely right. And that's why the Democratic race won't be settled tonight.
MARK SHIELDS: And the Democrats -- I mean, Democrats, it's borne of a very illogical sort of child psychology, which is every child's a winner, where we give everybody a medal, there's no winners, no losers, everybody gets a gold star. So you get 20 percent.
I mean, if you get 58 percent in a congressional district and I get 41 percent, OK, we split the delegates. I mean, 58 percent to 41 percent is a more thumping landslide victory that we've had in 90 percent of the presidential elections in this country's history. But why would we split them is absolutely...
DAVID BROOKS: Why should we have delegate haves and delegate have-nots? We should make it fair; we should make it equal.
JIM LEHRER: Again, thank you both very much.
