Between the childish antics on the Democratic side, discounting the Michigan and Florida votes, Rush Limbaugh's dimwitted urging Republicans to pollute the Democratic primaries yesterday, the chaos over the superdelegates and the rest of the nonsense we've seen this year, do you suppose we'll finally get a set of sane primary rules?
How about each person votes in their party's primary and the votes get counted with no superdelegates thrown in? Is that too much to ask? Why is this so hard?
It looks like the Democrats are going to go all the way to their convention fighting it out. Rush has provided them the perfect scapegoat if Obama doesn't get the nomination by flapping his fat gums and telling his listeners to crossover and vote for Hillary. Kos did that, too, by urging Michigan Democrats to vote for Mitt Romney. Can we please put a stop to that?
How about if we lock up Rush Limbaugh and Markos Moulitsas for the entire political season? If we put them in the same cell, it would provide the entertainment lost as we enacted some straightforward primary rules. While all of this is great political theater, it's hardly good democracy.
I think the biggest single problem with the primaries is that they *are* party functions, and yet *everybody* is expected to pay for holding them. Why can't the parties nominate their candidates on their own time, with their own resources, and anybody who wants to participate can join the party of their choice? Instead, they have hijacked the states' voting infrastructure, getting all of us to pay for their internal selection of nominees. And, as a result, we who are footing the bill for holding these elections expect, not unreasonably, to be allowed to participate. So, instead of the nominations being a low-key thing that the parties hash out on their own time with the results announced at their conventions, we are subjected to this 3-year circus where the nominee is whoever manages to maintain a good face for the longest time, and not who has the best plans or the greatest ability.
ReplyDeleteScrap the primaries, I say. It's a fundamentally flawed approach to choosing a candidate, better to put it out of our misery.
We have Bil Clinton to blame for the superdelegates. Its a recent re-introduction of the old smoke filled room strategy.
ReplyDeleteAs for Rush and Markos, I understand there is a government run tropical resort they could visit. For that matter thrown in Coulter and O'Riely.
Shouldn't the state parties be held more responsible for the mess they created than Rush or 'Kos?
ReplyDeleteAnd why stop with those two... throw 'em all in jail together. Well, at least 30 days before a primary and 60 days before a general election. That would clear things up. ...doh!
Tim, on the surface I like your idea but doesn't making the primary process solely a party function just encourage more backroom wheeling and dealing?
Dean, you are 100% correct, the state parties are to blame. A post on that to follow.
ReplyDeleteDean:
ReplyDeleteYes, it would certainly allow a lot of backroom dealing, but I'm not all that sure that's a completely bad thing. At least then, the candidates would be picked more or less rationally by people who knew them personally and had some idea what they were likely to do once in office. As it is, a relatively small portion of the population (the early-voting states) ends up picking the nominees for the rest of us, even though we almost all still end up footing the bills for state-paid primary elections.
As for the whole Michigan/Florida thing: I live in Michigan. For as long as I can remember, Michigan has *not once* mattered squat in a presidential primary, in spite of being one of the larger states. Up until this year, everything has been decided well before our primary was even held. Realistically, the trick the state parties pulled this year was more of a protest than a serious attempt to get in licks early: basically they were saying to the national parties "Who cares if our delegates don't get counted if we hold our primary early? They aren't likely to count anyway!"