Politics & Power Quote by Michael Beschloss

Beschloss is doing something slyly corrective here: stripping the presidency of its myth of popular origins and reminding you it was once a clubby, inside-game prize. The line’s plain, almost procedural language - “caucuses,” “party members in Congress” - is the point. It sounds like minutes from a meeting because he’s undercutting the modern assumption that presidential legitimacy has always flowed upward from voters. Early nominations were effectively handled by the same people who wrote laws, raised money, and negotiated patronage. Democracy, in this telling, starts as a backroom convenience.

The context is the early 1800s, when the first party system hardened and the constitutional machinery hadn’t yet been wrapped in the rituals Americans now treat as sacred. Washington’s nonpartisan aura was fading, Jeffersonian and Federalist factions were calcifying, and Congress was the one national institution with reliable reach. So Congress nominated because it could, not because it was ideal. The subtext is that “the people” were structurally absent: limited suffrage, slow communication, and a political culture that still feared mass participation as volatility.

Beschloss’s specific intent reads as historical debunking with contemporary relevance. When today’s debates flare up about “smoke-filled rooms,” primaries, superdelegates, or party elites “rigging” outcomes, he’s offering a calibration: elite gatekeeping isn’t a corruption of the system so much as one of its original operating modes. The quote works because it forces a reframe. Our current nomination circus isn’t a natural tradition; it’s a retrofit layered onto an older, more managerial idea of how power should be handed off.