EDITORIAL: The brokered convention

OPINION:

Only a fortnight ago the only authentic excitement the delegates to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland could look forward to were the funny hats and a visit to the Rock and Roll Museum. But the results of the Wisconsin primary this week put the cat among the pigeons. That’s always fun to watch as long as you’re not a pigeon.

The brokered convention, which is what all conventions were before prospective presidents discovered the primaries, looks far less a pipe dream than it once did. Donald Trump is still the way to bet, but the drubbing he took from Ted Cruz in Wisconsin might mean that the Republican grass roots has had enough of the mouth that roars. He could fall short of the 1,237 delegates needed for the nomination.

Mr. Cruz’s most realistic dream is that the Donald will be short of a full deck when he gets to Cleveland and enough committed delegates can be persuaded to abandon their commitments and switch their loyalty, such as loyalty is, and the brokers take over. Mr. Trump and his supporters think that if he arrives in Cleveland far ahead of everyone else but still shy of 1,237, Mr. Cruz and John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, should abandon their dreams and submit to the inevitable. If they won’t, goes the unspoken but strongly hinted at threat, the losers will walk out of the arena.

Newcomers to politics often arrive having never gotten the lecture on the facts of life. Donald Trump wouldn’t be the first front-runner to face a convention challenge. The last one in the Republican Party took place in 1976, when President Gerald Ford went into the convention with a majority of delegates, but Ronald Reagan’s managers forced votes on platform and rules questions, hoping delegates pledged to the president would abandon their pledges. Many delegates then, as now, were selected by state conventions, and though Mr. Ford had claim to a majority of the votes of the delegations, Mr. Reagan owned their hearts. He made a spirited race of it, and came close, but no cigar. The two men made peace and campaigned together in the fall. (Jimmy Carter won, anyway.)

A decade earlier, Richard Nixon had been the front-runner and backers of Mr. Reagan, making his first try, made common cause with Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York to keep Nixon short of the delegates he needed for a first-ballot nomination. They both knew that if they could do that, many delegates would be free of further commitments and every delegate could join a free-for-all.

Republicans who don’t like Mr. Trump are girding for a similar battle this summer. They may fail and there’s a good argument from the party’s point of view that they should. But if they do there would be nothing unique or unfair about it. That’s the way the rules are written. What would be unfair is an attempt by the establishment to bend or flout the rules in order to give the nomination to someone who doesn’t deserve it because he did not earn it with the usual two-year slog through the primaries.

The most important example set in the conventions of 1968 and 1976 was that winners and losers were intelligent enough, smart enough and unselfish enough to put their differences aside and lead a united party into the general election campaign that followed. The stakes this year are high, beginning with a majority for the Constitution on the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in the balance. Leaving Cleveland in a pout and with dreams of a misbegotten third-party candidate would lead only to disaster. Politics is for grown-ups.