Tilting at windmills.

• Author: Shapiro, Walter

No conventional wisdom

Charlie Peters (the founder of the Monthly and the greatest living windmill tilter) portrayed it as the most important and dramatic political convention of the past century. His 2005 book, Five Days in Philadelphia, vividly recreated the 1940 Republican convention, which nominated Wendell Willkie on the sixth ballot over the isolationist Robert Taft.

Just two weeks before the Philadelphia convention was gaveled to order, the victorious Nazis had paraded through the Arc de Triomphe on what was the saddest day of World War II. With the British Empire standing alone, Willkie was the only GOP candidate willing to buck the tides of isolationism. As Charlie Peters put it, "If Taft had been nominated he would have vigorously opposed the efforts FDR made to aid Britain and to enact a military draft in this country."

Willkie, a former utilities executive mocked as "the barefoot boy from Wall Street," didn't run in any primaries. Less than two months before the convention, Willkie was running at 3 percent in the polls. But in those days, voters were willing to defer to the judgment of party leaders as to who would be the strongest candidate in November.

Willkie and soon Donald Trump are the only presidential nominees in a century who have neither won World War II in Europe (Dwight Eisenhower) nor held political office (everyone else). Although no media conspiracy rivals the free ride that Trump has been granted by ratings-obsessed TV networks, Willkie's candidacy was boosted by gushy over-coverage from Henry Luce's empire. ]he May 13, 194o, issue of Life gave Willkie an unprecedented eleven-page spread that ended with this bit of puffery: "In the opinion of most of the nation's political cognoscenti Wendell Lewis Willkie is by far the ablest man the Republicans could nominate for President."

I recalled the Willkie convention in early May as the remnants of the Republican establishment collapsed faster than the French army in 1940. Instead of carrying the battle against Donald Trump to the convention floor, the GOP hoisted the white flag nearly eleven weeks before the delegates will assemble in Cleveland.

Even if Trump had swept the last primaries, rational Republicans still would have The modern primary system was wreckage of the 4968 Democratic had weapons at their disposal in Cleveland. Since the GOP delegates are free agents on all votes except the presidential balloting, the anti-Trump forces could have mounted credential challenges and even tried to pass a rule to allow the delegates to exercise their best judgment on a nominee.

That was the theory, anyway.

In reality, the exit polls consistently demonstrated that Republican voters refuse to accept the legitimacy of a political convention as a decisionmaking body. In Indiana, the final contested primary before the deluge, 67 percent of Republican voters stated that the delegates should nominate the winner of the most primaries if no candidate has a majority. Even in the Wisconsin primary, which represented the high-water mark of the Ted Cruz campaign, 55 percent of GOP voters believed that Republican delegates in...