Nostalgia for "smoke-filled rooms" in politics

With the ongoing sometimes-circus of the Republican debates and all the gaffes and mistakes attendant thereto, I have seen several essays in recent months pondering whether the American political system might be better off reverting to earlier techniques.  First, from an essay by Bruce Shulman for Salon:

The primary system intensifies many of the features of the political system that Americans routinely criticize in public opinion polls — the pervasive influence of Big Money in expensive, endless campaigns, the excessive influence of ideologically extreme activists, the inability of public officials to make deals and broker compromise.  It’s enough to make people long for a return to an earlier era when party leaders, determined to find winning candidates, hashed out the nominees and their platforms. Could Americans bring back the “smoke-filled room” (doing without the cigars, the scotch, and all-male enclaves)? [wait a minute! What's wrong with the "scotch" part?]...

The primary system is no sainted legacy of the Founding Fathers, it’s a relative newcomer. Believe it or not, primaries did not decide the major party presidential nominations until the 1970s. As late as 1968, the race for the White House featured just 15 primaries selecting only 40 percent of convention delegates...

Sadly, the current mess hardly realizes Robert LaFollette’s dream of open, democratic selection. If anything, the “interests” that Progressive reformers feared hold even greater sway now than when party officials hashed out the ballot lines: At least they needed to find candidates who would appeal to a broad swath of the rank-and-file...

And this from Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal:

The question asked everywhere is, Why is this the field? How did it come to this? Desperate questions bring desperate answers, such that I have been overheard mumbling of late: "Maybe it's time to bring back the smoke-filled rooms."

This was the nearly mythical system of selection in which party leaders and party bosses gathered over cigars, bourbon and branch* to pick a candidate "who could win." The most famous smoke-filled room pick was William McKinley, anointed for the 1896 election by Ohio kingmaker Mark Hanna (though in fact Hanna got McKinley nominated over the opposition of GOP party bosses)....

Notwithstanding distaste for the politicians picking candidates, [Robert Merry] wrote, "consider the dangers inherent in our system now, when candidates emerge based on their own judgment of their overwhelming talents and virtues, rather than those of their political peers, and when the vetting process has been truncated to a point where it relies on happenstance to save the system from people nobody really knows and who may be hiding serious flaws"—he was writing about Herman Cain—"that add up to political liabilities..."

The solution offered in the WSJ is counterintuitive and perhaps not surprising - to eliminate all campaign finance restrictions.  

*btw... know what "branch" is?  It's a local term that I first heard when I lived in Kentucky:

When a whiskey is ‘cut’ (i.e. watered down) prior to bottling, the water that is used is very important to the final product. The preferred source of water is called ’branch water’. Branch water comes directly from the stream that the distillery is built on; some companies even bottle this water, so that bar customers can further dilute their bourbon with the original bourbon water. This branch water starts its life in the underground limestone shelf that exists under most of Kentucky and part of Tennessee. The limestone shelf acts as a natural filter for water that passes over it. Branch water is particular for its lack of character, with no traces of iron or other minerals that would be harmful to the whiskey making process.