[Posted by Karl] Today is the Florida primary, which most expect to be won by Mitt Romney. While we await those results this evening, it is worth reflecting on the other primary Romney essentially sews up today : the invisible primary. Yesterday , I referred to the GOP apparat — and some of the response was to have a little fun with the idea, or to express weariness with debates about the “GOP establishment.” Such responses are understandable. After all, the Republican Party is not a conspiracy. Moreover, post-1968 reforms took presidential nominations out of the hands of party bosses and into the hands of caucus and primary voters, right? At the very least, it placed the process more in the hands of candidates and their campaigns, yes? Some political scientists think it is more complex than that. For example, in The Party Decides , Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller argue the rise of the invisible primary still gives the party control of presidential nominations: The invisible primary is essentially a long-running national conversation among members of each party coalition about who can best unite the party and win the next presidential election. The conversation occurs in newspapers, on Sunday morning television talk shows, among activist friends over beer, in chatter at party events, and, most recently, in the blogosphere. *** *** Some voices obviously count for more than others in the invisible primary, but anyone can join in simply by paying attention, attending party gatherings, and chiming in. The weighting of voices is determined by the resources (money, labor, expertise, prestige) the speaker can bring to party business and by the cogency of the remarks offered. Politics enters as well: pressure to go along with one’s group, to get on the bandwagon of the likely winner, or to repay old obligations. But the main business of the invisible primary is figuring out who can best unify the party and win the fall election. Note the authors’ definition of the party extends beyond its elected officials and party functionaries, but extends to activists, fundraisers, interest groups, campaign technicians and others. As Jay Cost noted last summer, the invisible primary has become extremely important because the cost of campaigning has increased exponentially and frontloading has altered the nature of the nomination battle. Since the institution of the caucus/primary reforms, Jimmy Carter remains the only candidate to win his party’s nomination without winning the invisible primary, as typically measured by fundraising and endorsements — and that was largely because the parties had not recognized that someone could beat the system before 1976 and the system was not as frontloaded. Howard Dean attempted a similar feat in 2004 via the Internet, but failed. Barack Obama may have beaten the seemingly establishment Hillary Clinton in 2008, but he raised more money than her heading into the Iowa caucuses and his endorsements in early states were competitive with hers . The closest example in the GOP, John McCain, stumbled in the summer of 2007, but started and finished as the winner of the invisible primary (especially after accounting for Romney’s significantly self-funded 2008 campaign). This cycle, anyone following politics could see the efforts mounted to pull Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan and Chris Christie into the race. The names of those behind such efforts were not always public, but it was hardly a shadowy cabal, either. Tim Pawlenty’s early withdrawal from the race was a product of the invisible primary (donors lost confidence in him after the Iowa straw poll). Most commentary and coverage of Ron Paul, Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann reflected the judgment of the invisible primary that these were not serious candidates. The invisible primary has never been more visible. Of course, opinion is far from unanimous on the theory that party elites play a decisive role in determining presidential nominations. Nate Silver is among the skeptics, helpfully noting that Romney may be preferred by GOP elites, that preference is rather tepid. Silver focuses primarily on the relative scarcity of endorsements overall, but that data is corroborated by reports that many big-name GOP donors did not commit to Mitt until Chris Christie was officially out. However, even if you are more partial to the view that the current rules emphasize candidates, their consultants and voters over the party per se , Jay Cost correctly notes the early caucus and primary states often favor moderates and attract large numbers of the poorly informed. Even if you do not think the party decides, the party does more or less set the calendar. You know who that benefits? –Karl
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The invisible primary
From the diaries . . . So with New Hampshire behind us (and with any luck, never again in front of us), and with my tendency to be overloaded with life to the point at which I catch up on things I meant to write two to fifty-two weeks after they are timely, I wanted to say something about the controversy which was and is best described as “National Romney Online.” For those of you who don’t keep up on conservative tendencies to engage in circular firing squads, a summary is in order; for those of you who couldn’t give a rat’s anus , best just to skip this diary altogether. In short, National Review — which backed Mitt Romney in 2008 after months and years of not-so-coyly talking him up — and which has not, in fairness, endorsed anyone as a publication yet, is perceived to be carrying water for the Mittster this time around. The battle was joined when Ramesh Ponnuru — arguably the brightest of National Review’s lights, and the editor with the greatest credibility among mainstream conservatives — endorsed Romney , albeit not without qualifications; the battle escalated when the publication as a whole went full-metal William Foster on Newt Gingrich for a thousand and one sins against conservatism and electability . In passing, the magazine took shots at Ron Paul (who hasn’t?), Michelle Bachmann, and Rick Perry; then took time to praise Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum, whose only apparent problem was a lack of executive experience. The didactic tone at the end of the piece seemed almost calculated to irritate any reader not yet enraged by the closing of the piece. The backlash was intense. It was so severe that Jim Geraghty, whose Morning Jolt newsletter is one of three to which I voluntarily subscribe, has remained defensive since. Jonah Goldberg, of whom we all thought only the death of a near relative could bring him low, sent out a G-File (the second to which I subscribe) that basically sounded like a particular Megadeth song . Before I go any farther, I’d like to explain why I’m writing this. I was not one of the founders of RedState, and my position was nebulous from early on. I am not now affiliated with RedState. I still love the site and its denizens, but like almost all of the original staff — Josh Trevino, Ben Domenech, and roughly 783 out of the 785 initial Editors who came on board in July 2004 — my only link to the site is a past about which most current readers could not give two running leaps. (Or a rat’s anus.) But I was there in the sandbox basically on day one, and after the first 680 or so editors quit, there was this great feeling of solidarity as we tried to become relevant in the 2004 elections. As I’ve noted before , we weren’t flush with resources — the Founders handled the whole thing out of their own pockets — and so we really appreciated any helping hand we got. Jim Geraghty’s was one of those helping hands. To this day, I hold a warm spot in my heart for him just on the strength of sitting on some email threads with us, plotting, talking, conniving. I’ll always remember a phone call I had with the Swede after one of those email exchanges, talking about how amazing it was that we were actually being treated seriously by Jim Geraghty of all people. (We also discussed other things, like pie. Erick likes pie.) And then there’s Ramesh. I think I spoke for the entire Contributor staff, or pretty darned close, when I said nice things about Ramesh when I resigned , and by the Kraken’s third head, I was sincere. It was my hope to write as well, as cogently, and as honestly as Ramesh when I grew up, a goal I hold to this day. I got one of the first run of his Party of Death , and read it cover to cover, enjoying every word, appreciating the serious, deliberate, intelligent, measured tone. (I don’t do serious, deliberate, intelligent, measured tone.) And Jonah? I’m basically doing a poor imitation of Jonah Goldberg as I write this. Without any disrespect to its current leadership, I believed and believe that his departure as editor of NRO is one of the greatest losses the publication as a whole has ever experienced. So, as I try to explain to people at National Review who will never read this, I want them to understand as they don’t read this that I’m saying what I’m saying out of gratitude, admiration, and affection. I’m being sincere because I think a gulf has opened, and I don’t think they understand it. I say this as a friend not a single one of you has ever met. You have lost your way. The editorial that sparked all of this is metonymic of the greater problem. Newt Gingrich has his share (my share, and about forty other people’s shares) of problems, in terms of record, temperament, executive experience, self-regard, this list could go on for forty more lines. The vast majority of those offended by the editorial were not passionately leaping to Newt Gingrich’s defense; they were leaping to attack what National Review has become. Consider that in one fell swoop the publication managed to dismiss the longest-serving governor in the nation, with a record of conservative governance unmatched by any governor current or recent past, linking him unsubtly to a crank known for conspiracy theories and Ron Paul; praise Mitt Romney, who while apparently a model conservative (the sort who helps get abortion funding in state-run mandatory health insurance) has failed to seal the deal with conservatives for some unknowable reason; praise Jon Huntsman, whose entire campaign was a John Weaver special from tip to tail (this is not a compliment); and praise Rick Santorum, one of the greatest (if dimmest) champions the pro-life movement has had, and who was so conservative he went to war for massive increases in federal spending almost every day, and whose greatest knock is not his loss to an anodyne nobody by a margin that made even the rest of 2006 look like a joke, but rather a lack of executive experience. You praised, in other words, a man whom only Kathryn Jean Lopez and Justin Hart could describe as carrying any sort of conservative record , a man who has spent his entire campaign shooting at conservatives, and a man who did more than anyone other than George W. Bush and Tom DeLay to stain the Republican image of fiscal austerity. In the very same piece, you treated a man with actual, real, conservative accomplishments over the course of a decade of governance as a tongue-tied embarrassment. (Full disclosure: I like and support Rick Perry, but I believe and believed he shouldn’t run this time, so close to George W. Bush. At any rate, I’m pretty sure Obama wins on the strength of incumbency, so I feel like we’re having this battle for principle’s sake.) To many of us out here, that seemed like the same sort of tone-deaf water-carrying for milquetoast Republicans we’ve seen for over a decade now. To many of us, National Review’s fighting spirit — against Republicans, that is — took crippling hits under the Bush Administration, to the point where we’d expect to see Roy Blunt on the cover as the Greatest Conservative of this Decade (Runner Up: Mitch McConnell; Second Runner Up: Charles Grassley) if Mitt doesn’t already have that award sewn up, too. At a time when the activist portion of your readership is hell-bent on stopping a fiscal nightmare and destroying Obamacare, your response is to praise a man known for a gigantic government program (incidentally, the model for Obamacare), a governor with a legitimate record of fiscal sanity who thought the stimulus wasn’t big enough , and a senator whose fiscal accomplishments all echo Medicare Part D. That Ramesh’s mark was all over the editorial — writing styles are like fingerprints — stung even more, because it suggested a closer confluence of the pro-Romney forces of National Review and the nominally independent ones. It also felt like Ramesh was being deployed as a weapon against National Review’s readership. Not only that, but your collective response to the Bain issue — which, remember, is going to get just the teensiest airing from Obama’s merry crew in the general election — has been like the sound of a thousand scalded cats screaming in pain and fear , but without the silence that comes after. Instead of understanding that a significant portion of the conservative movement is currently unemployed , has long had a streak of populism, and is vaguely certain that the words “hedge fund” mean “Wall Street” (and “Wall Street” means “bailouts”), so that Bain Capital is now symbolic of everything that has plagued the country for the last five years, you accuse everyday conservatives of being like Huey Freaking Long. You are defending a rich guy, who was born into money and made even more, who is running as a job creator who cannot identify a single job other than his own that he created in a field that is known for chopping up companies to extract equity, running on the strength of that inherited and earned money, as if he is the same sort of exemplar of the free market as a mom-and-pop meat market. You are doing this in the middle of the worst economic environment of the last several decades. You are staking your collective credibility on a man who governed to the left of every Republican governor before him, for a single term, before he bailed to run for the Presidency, and who left his state’s Republican apparatus in ruins, but not before he created the monstrosity that became the model for the abomination that is Obamacare. You have done all of this while pretending not to endorse the man. I am desperately afraid that this makes sense to you. You have alienated yourself from your readership and your movement to the point where many of us read Ramesh Ponnuru’s work — Ramesh Ponnuru’s work! — to learn what the Republicans in Congressional leadership are thinking and saying among themselves at any given time. You have missed the flavor and tone of the Tea Parties and their impact on the wider conservative movement. You seem to believe that a continued (and admirable) devotion to the pro-life cause, not even always in words alone, is sufficient to excuse a politician for his manifold sins. You have forgotten that one of the founding creeds of the modern conservative movement is A Choice, Not An Echo . You have mistaken the art of the possible for resignation to the good-enough. You are, as I write this, conflating pro-market with pro-business. You are supposed to be a beacon of what is best in us, not a reminder that some days, you just can’t win. In the end, I suspect I’ve wasted two billable hours (give or take) writing this when I should be feeding my family, because I also think you’ve given up on understanding your customers. I canceled my own damn subscription something like five years ago because you insisted on publishing that perverted, paleocon, racist John Derbyshire against all sense and reason, but I still read NRO religiously until not very long ago at all. It’s sad to see the online site — that I read while a student in law school, surrounded by lefties during the Clinton Administration — descend so far, and the magazine go even farther. Given the complete absence of any change in your direction, I have to imagine you’ve seen no fall in your advertising revenues; as good believers in the free market, I have to believe you think you’re doing it right. It’s a shame, and we’re all poorer for it. We’ll miss you, and hope you come back to us some day.
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To Our Friends at (The) National Review
Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death. Neil Postman, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” We live in an entertainment culture. The lives of many in this country revolve around the consumption of media and entertainment. Sports is almost an object of worship to some, and events such as the BCS Championship and the Super Bowl are virtually national holidays, surrounded by endless attention in the news/sports media and other popular culture outlets. Given that media consumption is now so ubiquitous, with flat-screen digital TVs, smartphones, satellite TV, streaming video, iPads and other multimedia sources, is it any wonder that politics has now taken on a similar flavor? 2012 is an election year and along with it, politics as entertainment has come to the fore. Even Entertainment Weekly has a “ Politics As Entertainment ” page! But the biggest proof point for this is the seemingly endless series of debates between GOP candidates. This may make for good entertainment, but does it make for good politics? We could see this coming long before the primary season began. As Politico noted on Sunday , GOP Chairman Reince Priebus made an attempt to put some controls around the debate schedule. In words that were one part prescient, one part naive, Priebus in April warned at a media breakfast: “The idea of twenty different forums and twenty different groups is a little much. We need to have some order in our debate process.” Priebus’s effort to have a Republican National Committee commission take control of the process quickly got answers from presidential campaigns and sponsoring news organizations: nice try. And fat chance. I believe there are two key reasons that the campaigns and the news organizations have fed this debate overload. First, the campaigns, specifically of the lower-tiered candidates, saw debates as a means to get exposure for their (wo)man. Candidates such as Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and Jon Huntsman would likely have never had the slightest chance of success without the debates to give them a hearing. But the debates have only delayed what most would consider to be the inevitable end to the lower-tiered campaigns. From the Politico: The dynamic has shaped the GOP race at every turn. Candidates like Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich went, at least briefly, from the margins to center stage based on debate performances. Candidates who looked formidable by traditional yard sticks, like Rick Perry and Tim Pawlenty, crashed based on lackluster debate skills. Meanwhile, keeping candidates like Michigan Rep. Thad McCotter and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson off stage so deprived them of oxygen that it contributed to their departures from the GOP race. “If they keep you out of the debates, you are out of the conversation, and you can’t run,” McCotter told The Detroit News when he dropped out in September. “It was sort of death by media.” Romney solidified his standing as national front-runner with strong early performances in the debates. But his advisers, leery about exposing their candidate to so many tests, maneuvered behind the scenes to control the process. “Second-tier candidates will take every debate they can take,” said Tom Rath, a top Romney adviser in New Hampshire. “The people who are in the upper tier don’t want to run the risk of being arrogant to the people in the second tier, so they show up. So it becomes a who’s going to blink first?” However, the support from the news outlets is more intriguing. This second motivation for more debates stems from the “reality TV” aspects of presidential debates. It gives the media outlets free content, much like an episode of “Cops” or “America’s Funniest Home Videos”. This weekend produced the unprecedented attraction of two nationally televised debates separated by just twelve hours, with a Saturday evening debate at St. Anselm College in Goffstown on ABC News and another one Sunday morning on NBC News as part of a special edition of “Meet the Press.” The weekend highlighted an intriguing paradox of this year’s contest. One of the rare beliefs that Republicans have in common with President Barack Obama is disdain for the 24-hour mainstream media culture, with its emphasis on process and tendency to view politics through the prisms of entertainment and sports. Yet a media-wary party this year is in the midst of a nominating contest in which media — most especially cable news networks — have had more power than the national party, early-state activists or anyone else in setting the agenda. Rep. Frank Guinta (R-N.H.), who laments how debates have “nationalized the race,” hopes both parties get control next time. He thinks voters ask better questions than debate moderators. If they can use debates to make the news themselves, why would the media be motivated to limit the number of debates? Virtually every major media outlet: CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, Bloomberg, C-SPAN – have all sponsored and/or co-sponsored a GOP debate this season. And with each has come over-dramatized commentary, play-by-play, live blogging (like here at Redstate), “post-game analysis” and endless TV and print news stories and blog postings in response. Political junkies watch these events as if they were the Sunday afternoon NFL Game of the Week. If there was a baseball-style scorecard to keep, we’d be keeping it. We count the number of gaffes, one-liners and figurative body blows as if we were tracking a pitcher’s ERA or a goaltender’s GAA. But is this a good thing? As RS co-contributor Aaron Gardner points out in his diary , “ Unfortunately, it appears we have decided that we can forgive bad policy records easier than we can forgive poor debate performances. ” The “stats” from the debates have become the issue, rather than the issues themselves. The consistently poor debate moderation has not helped matters. Almost universally, left-leaning news mavens have “moderated” these debates and have been more like shark fishermen chumming bait and waiting for the water to fill with blood, rather than acting as moderators facilitating the interactions between candidates. This week, George Stephanopoulos was widely panned for his hyperpartisan performance as “moderator” in the New Hampshire debate. According to the Daily Caller , ABC News commentator George Stephanopoulos directed pointed, hard-edged questions to Republican presidential candidates during Saturday night’s New Hampshire debate, often attacking without providing evidence to justify his broadsides. When questioning former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Stephanopoulos, a former senior advisor in the administration of Democratic President Bill Clinton, premised some inquiries on the assertion — offered without supporting facts — that Romney’s job-creation statistics were inaccurate. “Now, there have been questions about that calculation of 100,000 jobs. So if you could explain it a little more,” Stephanopoulos asked Romney of the former governor’s claims about jobs created by companies he has helmed. “I’ve read some analysts who look at it and say that you’re counting the jobs that were created but not counting the jobs that were taken away. Is that accurate?” “No, it’s not accurate,” Romney bluntly responded. “It includes the net of both. I’m a good enough numbers guy to make sure I got both sides of that.” Stephanopoulos did not cite any analysts by name. This was not the first occurrence of this media-figure-turned-leftist-talking-point-o-matic syndrome. A similarly biased moderation effort came from Brian Williams back in September and from Diane Sawyer in December . Perhaps this can be written off as poor grades in Speech 101, but given the left-wing bias in the mainstream media, I would place my bets on an intentional effort to poison the GOP candidate field. As some here at Redstate have pointed out, we appear to have allowed the media to select our candidates for us via their debate skills, rather than we Republicans/conservatives assessing their policy positions and their ability to be the President of the United States. The debates are not all bad. There is obviously value in demonstrating the ability for a candidate to respond to adversaries in a stress-filled environment. As the Politico article points out, The ability to project a strong, crisp message under the glare of TV lights and a national audience is not necessarily the worst way to test presidential readiness — any more than the ability to make a good impression while shaking hands at a Des Moines, Iowa, or Manchester diner. Iowa GOP Chairman Matt Strawn said he welcomed having a large number of debates, several of which were in Iowa. He noted that the televised encounters gave a platform to underfunded candidates, like Rick Santorum, to command attention. “Any question that you’re going to get asked in a primary debate better prepare you for a general election debate,” Strawn said. “They make the nominee a stronger general election candidate.” However, there is a limit to the usefulness of this format, especially given the conditions fostered by hostile “moderators” and the grueling schedule that the dozens of debates add to the “normal” grind of a campaign. What can be done about this? The news outlets are free to hold whatever events they so choose, and the candidates are free to participate in any event they so choose. Can the parties do anything about this? Should they? Some here at Redstate derisively speak of “the establishment” picking our candidates. In a way, the debates have circumvented that . Former Iowa GOP Chairman Steve Grubbs, who ran Cain’s Iowa campaign this year, thinks it’s good for voters to hear a diversity of views — not just ones vetted by insiders. “Whatever was powerful before — parties, machine politics or simply years of building a national organization — has been almost completely usurped by the power of the political debate,” said Grubbs. “And I think that’s a good thing.” But where does it end? At what point do the debates become an almost nightly event, akin to endless reruns of “M*A*S*H”? How do we prevent the mainstream press from selecting our candidate, rather than some nebulous “party machine?” Karl Rove wrote about this in a WSJ op-ed back in December: For the most part, the debates have been helpful. Before them, the “generic Republican” never led President Barack Obama in any Gallup survey. Since early July, the generic GOPer has often been leading Mr. Obama. The debates likely contributed to this shift. Still, there can be too much of a good thing. Debates have nearly crippled campaigns, chewing into the precious time each candidate has to organize, raise money, set themes, roll out policy and campaign. Each debate kills at least three days: one day (and sometimes two) to prepare, the day of the debate, and the day after, spent dealing with the fallout from the night before. This late in the process—there are 19 days until Iowa and 26 days until New Hampshire, with the Christmas and New Year’s holidays eliminating crucial campaign days—many candidates might want to chart their own schedules and set their own message priorities. But the debates won’t allow for that. This also needs to be said: What we’re watching are not really debates. They are seven- or eight-person news conferences. Their choppy nature makes cogent argument difficult and thoughtful policy discussion almost nonexistent. There’s a premium placed on memorable sound bites and snappy comebacks. Those are the clips that are endlessly replayed. Debates transfer power to the media, draining it from the campaigns. Moderators and their news organizations—through questions they frame or select—have more impact than candidates on what’s covered and discussed. Because each debate is a lavish feast of comments and confrontations, the media also decide what aspects are most worthy of post-debate coverage. Rove’s last point (highlighted) is key: we have allowed a transfer of power to the media. And given the political leanings of the media in this country, that is a very bad thing. But hey, this is a boon to the revenues of the media outlets! But it is far worse for our political process and our culture. Again, from Neil Postman: “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” In some ways, the endless stream of debates have reduced politics to “a form of baby-talk” where policy is secondary and sound bites and slams are the goal. The concern this election season is not the death of culture, it’s the death of our nation. Permitting an overdose of entertainment-drenched debates media events to determine the course of the election is, in some odd ways useful in candidate vetting, but in others, it is unwise and dangerous.
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Politics As Entertainment, Endless GOP Debates Edition
WASHINGTON — An underlying theme of our times that has gone unperceived by the high and mighty in media, government, and other locales where the politically alive come to roost is the thumping failure of an increasing number of counter-productive old Progressive reforms. Once they were beheld as prodigies from the minds of superior citizens, such stars of yesteryear as Robert M. La Follette and Woodrow Wilson. Now they are revealed as hollow shams or at best curiosities. Surely soon they will be seen for what they are, catnip from the egotists. In a political year Progressive reforms from a bygone era are all around us, assumed, by the high and mighty, as the way things should be. Is there too much money in politics? But of course! Are the pols being bought off by the vested interests? For a certitude, the giant corporations, the fat cats, the vested interests are flooding the Halls of Congress and lesser political venues with cash (never in this list is included the unions, particularly the public-sector unions). What shall be done about this vast influx of money into politics? Well, though Americans spend more on dog food than on elections, our troubled reformers have a solution. Cut donations to politicians from large donors. Alas, every time they do so the clever pols — often, clever reform pols — find new ways to fund their campaigns. Most recently this process began with the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform, which unconstitutionally limited corporate and union freedom of political speech. So ruled the Supreme Court in its 2010 Citizens United decision. The eventual result was ever more accountants hired by campaigns and the advent of today’s Super PACs, which is to say the political action committees of the present moment that raise and spend large amounts on politics but claim not to be in cahoots with any of the politicians that they favor. Consequently, there is even less accountability by Super PACs. The campaign finance reformers will now go after the Super PACs. Some fanciful reform of them will be dreamt up. The pols will again thwart the reform and the process will continue. But maybe enough is enough. In truth, the only reform necessary is transparency. If the electorate knows the origins of donations and the direction in which they go they will know enough about the candidates to cast a sensible vote. Which brings us to the absurdity of the caucuses and the primaries. Bring back the smoke-filled room! Or at least a room full of Democrats and Republicans that are truly representative of their parties. Progressives once saw the primary system as the latest advance in the democratic process. Thrust the party bosses aside and let the citizenry vote for the presidential candidates. The consequence is that the casual voter overwhelms the committed party member — often the one-issue voter overwhelms the committed party voter with several issues and the good of the party in mind. Large amounts of money go to local media to coax out the casual voter once or twice in an electoral cycle. The result is that a transient mob — and sometimes a very small transient mob — gives us our presidential candidates for the general election: Barack Obama for the Democrats, probably Mitt Romney for the Republicans. In neither case is the candidate a typical Democrat or Republican. Under the present system of caucus and primary voting, the great states of Iowa and New Hampshire are given disproportionate voice in who will be chosen for the presidential race. Frankly, I like the galoots from Iowa and New Hampshire. From all I can tell they look and think pretty much like me, especially on politics. Yet there is something wrong here. I think way back before the Progressives were ever heard of, state conventions made a lot more sense than the present system. As I see it, most Americans are coming to agree.
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Catnip From the Egotists
This just keeps getting better and better for the Virginia GOP, doesn’t it? Via Ballot Access News , first we get the Attorney General for Virginia pointing out that the requirements for ballot access are far too restrictive : I would throw out for consideration that we should lower our requirements to 100 legitimate signatures per congressional district. Let’s face it, absent a serious write-in challenge from some other candidate, Virginia won’t be nearly as ‘fought over’ as it should be in the midst of such a wide open nomination contest. Our own laws have reduced our relevance. Sad. …and suggesting that a write-in ballot is possible. Which, as a lot of people with perhaps vested interests in there not being any more candidates on the ballot would tell you, is: a, impossible; and b, so mind-bogglingly obviously impossible that anybody who suggests that such a thing would be possible would be as dumb as Newt Gingrich. Of course, some of the people who are most pushing the ‘dumb as Newt Gingrich’ bit are perhaps not entirely clear about Gingrich’s actual position : “And we hope to launch a write-in campaign. We’re getting an amazing number of people who … believe Virginians ought to have the right to choose and shouldn’t be restricted to two people.” When a reporter noted that state law prohibits write-in votes in Virginia primaries, Gingrich said: “There’s time for them to change it. If something’s wrong, they ought to fix it.” Via Virginia Virtucon , and note that the Times-Dispatch article quoted above went into the details about how difficult it would be to change the law in this case. To summarize: the time limits in place would require emergency legislation and a super-majority in order to get the bill to pass in time… it’d still be a good idea to do it, frankly, but it’d be harder to do it than it looks. Which point lets me segue to another amusing/annoying aspect of this entire sorry mess. To wit: it’s amazing just how many people online are suddenly claiming expert knowledge in the arcane field of primary ballot access for one specific, only somewhat important, American state. Particularly since none of them would have been able to pass a test on the subject prior to – and I’m being charitable, here – December 23rd. And, honestly: it’s reasonable enough to suggest that, say, my own pre-Christmas inexperience with this level of Virginian state election law might be a factor in whether or not to take my opinions seriously. It becomes less reasonable to so suggest that when said inexperience is shared by the former Speaker of the House. It enters “unreasonable” territory – except, perhaps, for the most partisan – when the actual Attorney General of Virginia is equally inexperienced. Put another way: after a certain level of the difficulty in navigating the system you should probably start looking at the system itself, and not the people who are having the difficulty. Final note, because it needs to be: the day will likely end (deadline’s at 5 PM, IIRC) with the VA GOP only certifying Romney and Paul for the primary ballot… which is entirely their call to make . A lot of people are trying to argue that the party’s hands are tied by state law, which is precisely backward : implementation of this particular aspect of state law is controlled by the parties… as can be seen by the fact that the Virginia GOP is openly waiving requirements of the certification process for Mitt Romney in the first place . There are people who really, really, really don’t want you to think of the implications of that… Moe Lane ( crosspost ) PS: A note of personal irony? I’m not a Gingrich supporter; I’m a Perry one, and if they had kept Gingrich on the ballot I’d probably have just winced and moved, as they say, on. PPS: It would be remiss of me to not note that Ken Cuccinelli is going to be running for Governor of Virginia in 2013… which means, against current Lt. Governor Bill Bolling in the primary. Lt. Gov. Bolling is, of course, Mitt Romney’s Virginia campaign chairman, which is not so much evidence of a conspiracy to make Romney the only person on the ballot (trust me, the VA GOP would prefer this to be Romney/Gingrich; from what I’m hearing, having Paul be the alternative appalls them, too) as it is a warning that this affair may turn into a fight-by-proxy.
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VA AG Ken Cuccinelli calls for primary ballot reform, write-in option.
