Rebuild the parties?

That's what RealClearPolitics' Jay Cost argues we should do, at the end of a long analysis of the perversities of the Clinton-Obama race. The analysis is quite interesting in its own right, especially in his demonstration that the Democratic nomination process gives more weight to states that vote Republican, but I'm most interested in his concluding remarks:

We ask, why is Congress broken? Perhaps it is because the parties—the greatest mechanisms ever invented for managing governmental agents—have been stripped of their power. They have been given over to what scholars call "candidate control." Candidates are not responsible to the parties and the voters they represent. Instead, the parties are in service to the candidates. There is no doubt that the parties of the 19th and early 20th centuries were malfunctioning, corrupt, and irresponsible. But rather than reform them, we decimated them.

I think this nomination debacle is, in part, the fault of our disregard for the political parties. They are these hollowed-out husks that cannot handle the simple task of resolving a two-way dispute.

Here's a question for you. Take the presidents of the last 40 years: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43. Granted, Ford was never elected, but neither were folks like Chester Alan Arthur. On my read, ranking the presidents, that's one second-tier great president (Reagan) and a bunch of folks who are mediocre or worse. Now compare them to the presidents of the previous 170 years—a list which, yes, includes failures like James Buchanan, U. S. Grant, and Herbert Hoover, just as much as it does the likes of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But still, taken all in all, compare the lists. Are we really better off for the primary/caucus system we have now for choosing presidential nominees than we were under the more party-dominated system of the past? And if you think we are, are we enough better off to justify the massive amounts of money spent on advertising for primaries and caucuses? (To say nothing of having to endure all that advertising, and all the rhetoric, and all the rest of it.) Our current setup is clearly more democratic than the way parties used to choose their nominees . . . but I'm starting to think we might actually be better off here with a little less democracy.