Whose Primaries are They? (uncommon sense from Babbin)

Read on- further in the article Babbin asks questions to each of the candidates..

The other question- when are Republicans going to take back OUR primaries?

No kidding. Republicans in open primary states, especially the early ones, should be lobbying HARD to get them closed. Dems and the media are choosing our candidates, and it will be the party’s undoing.

Josh, here is ANOTHER person who I believe supports Fred Thompson who is screaming for republicans to take back our own nominations.

So again, if you insist that you are NOT a republican, and that you will NOT support our candidate unless it’s the guy YOU are voting for, you are going against the stated wishes of a LOT of people who post here on FR and are supporting Fred Thompson.

I think this should be enough to make my point clear. I won’t mention it again. You have to decide what principles you stand for, and how important it is that republicans get to choose our own nominee.

Wow, excellent and spot on analysis by Babbin.

We need people like this speaking out daily about this process and the candidates.

The MSM, especially FOX, have done a traitorous and backstabbing lousy job with the debates.

It is sad when I have to credit Charlie Gibson for doing a better job than FOX.

Loks like Babbin is telling us to grab hold of our senses and quit allowing the MSM, Dems, and Beltway pundits to dictate our outcome.

In TX, we don’t register by party, but you can only vote in one primary. There are always some cross-overs, because there are so few (locally or state-wide) who run under D.

EXCELLENT article.
Thanks for posting.
This will never make the MSM.

24 hour news is a blessing and a curse, eh?

What’s so worrisome is that the media is clearly attempting to manipulate the electorate. Our mistake (or at least mine) is assuming that everyone is paying attention and noticing the clever and subtle ways we’re being used by them.

For this to have transpired, either the RNC is as dumb as a rock, or they’re willing accomplices to moving the Republican Party to the left.

Another reason why ron Paul has gathered so many votes.
Democrat and independant crossover.

His numbers will start bottoming out soon. And Fred’s numbers will continue to rise.

Agreed. FOX clearly has an agenda regarding Fred- and the GOP in general. We can learn a good deal from FOX if we pay attention, sadly, none of the lessons I’m learning are reassuring.

When a media organization loses the TRUST of the viewer or reader- the contract is broken.

Do Democrats allow Republicans to vote for THEIR candidate? We don’t do that kind of thing even if we could.

I don’t think Dems allow crossover primary voting- someone will correct me if I’m mistaken:)

Did you witness what FOX did during Fred’s speech on Saturday?

It was shameful and obvious to anyone watching. They must of had really angry people contacting them because they tried to act like it was tech problems, then, they went back to it.

I was glad Fred stuck it to them. We all know the only reason they were going to show Fred at all was because they were panting over the fact they thought he was dropping out.

FOX has become obvious and shameful. it is sad that we had to switch over to CNN to see the speech.

At least CNN makes no bones about the fact they are biased. FOX is the wolf guarding the henhouse.

I thought people could see right through the media, too. At least, Republican primary voters, who have reason to be skeptical but apparently aren’t. Every so often you see polls where huge numbers of people say they believe the media is biased, then election time rolls around and they buy everything the MSM says about the candidates, hook, line and sinker. It’s frustrating to those of us who pay attention and take our vote seriously.

Indeed. Who’s Primaries are they? So far, they are but very tiny pluralities in smaller states. That the States have inordinate decision-making power over the interests of the People shows how compromised this system has become, and how unfair and discouraging a reflection of the sentiments of a Majority of Republicans it has shown to those inside and outside the Party. It is wrong and should be changed somewhere short of its demonstrated ability to deliver disaster Republicans, or a majority of Republican, do not desire.

Fred Thompson has, by now, returned to Tennessee to spend time with his mother, suffering with pneumonia, and, we presume, to decide whether to fight on. As one of those who gazed on the field of challengers and decided someone was missing, and then donated my Widows Mite less than a day before he formed his formal exploratory committee, and then sacrificed to donate another such Widows Mite to aid his essential Air War in South Carolina, I hope he will stay in the contest.

It’s a tough game, a new game. But it does nothing to endear me either to the character or the authenticity of the kind of neurotic Christianity practiced by the former governors of both Arkansas or South Carolina to hear them spout off about Fred Thompson being a straw man for John McCain; that Senator Thompson stole Governor Huckabee’s winning margin.

I’ve never, for a moment, been inclined to support former Governor Huckabee. Had I supported his “Class Act,” I would not have encouraged him to run in the first place! The idea being bandied about by he and his supporters that they somehow “split the same base,” somehow or another shows either how poorly counseled he is, or how poorly he takes good counsel.

Yes, like Bob Dole in 1996, he remains the man Democrats most want Republicans to nominate, and this is something they, themselves, will admit. Ask Bob Beckel.

Jeb Babbin has finally said what needs shouting from the roof tops. The first impressions, and sadly the very selection of Republican delegates is being decided by Jello-head independents and, God forbid, Democrats.

Every presidential election in our history is unique. In November 1975, Ronald Reagan announced he would challenge President Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination. At the time, this was widely remarked upon as suspiciously early. Everything Ronald Reagan did was suspicious, and formally entering a presidential contest a full year ahead of the election was unprecedented.

Of course, he lost that contest, which went all the way to the Convention, and returned to defeat another incumbent in 1980, this time a Democrat, in the first landslide victory by a Republican challenger in history. From the emergence of the Primary system for selecting delegates to state and national convention, every presidential election cycle has been colored by it, and its influence more powerful. The confident assertions made by commentators and the experts they cite concerning “what’s next” are useless, and this has been demonstrated clearly in 2008.

Here in January, with only a handful of small states having begun the varying stages in the selection of delegates nine months before the Democrat and Republican conventions, the desperate search for certainty about the future, a part of human nature and the marketplace, instead created only the expectation of certainty, without delivering anything close. Instead, anxiety and perceptions that, hopefully, will not affect our international markets permanently.

The appalling process used by both the established political parties to select their eventual nominees is not just unfair and perhaps even illegal, it has become ridiculous. The first time observer and the grizzled old-timer alike can tell something isn’t right that needs righting. Since I’ve been a supporter of former Senator Thompson, it’s important to point out I would feel this way if he’d made “a clean sweep” and was heading into what they are now calling “Super Duper Tuesday” the “presumed front-runner.”

Big changes in the method used to select their presidential nominee by the Democrat Party came after the perception sunk in of having had their clock cleaned in 1968 and again in 1972. The obscure candidates used to make it all the way to the conventions, and late in the tempestuous 1968 election year Senator George McGovern declared his intention to run for the nomination.

Primaries weren’t anything new in 1968, but their importance in public perception was underscored as never before, becoming milestone events in a milestone year. In March, with the War in Vietnam just beginning to wear on the economy and in a nation struggling with racial and social turmoil that, forty years later, still escapes historic perspective, President Lyndon Johnson was challenged in the New Hampshire Primary by Senator Eugene McCarthy of Wisconsin. Few paid much attention until the President addressed the nation, taking time on the three existing television networks to discuss developments in Southeast Asia. At the end, the president stunned viewers by announcing he would “neither seek nor accept the nomination.”

The importance of New Hampshire’s Primary would never again be the same.

Soon after, the junior Senator from New York and former attorney general and brother of Johnson’s murdered predecessor Robert F. Kennedy announced his intention to run, and he sealed his theft of McCarthy’s challenge on the night of June 5, when he won the California Primary. After his speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he was shot in the head like his older brother. He lingered, as voters re-lived the still fresh memories of John Kennedy’s assassination four years earlier, and he was soon dead.

The stunned nation, already reeling in social upheaval, continued to review the late president’s assassination as Senator Kennedy was buried next to his brother in Arlington.

Among many other things, the importance of the California Primary would also never be the same.

Soon came the Chicago Convention, and despite its devolution to riot, the first Vice President appointed under the 24th Amendment, Hubert Humphrey won the nomination. By contrast, from Miami Beach, the Republicans nominated Richard Nixon in a well-ordered convention that saw the beginning of something now standard at the conventions staged by both major parties, the “spontaneous demonstration.”

With as slim a Plurality of the Popular Vote and as clear a Majority secured of the Electoral College as John Kennedy received defeating Vice President Nixon eight years earlier, the Republican’s nominee similarly defeated Vice President Humphrey in November. And, also as it had been in 1960, anyone who had sought certainty of the outcome the previous January would have been proven foolish indeed.

In defeat, the Old Guard in the Democrat Congress and on the National Committee sought reconciliation with the New Left within that had shaken if from the White House. Senator George McGovern, whose short-lived presidential candidacy was based on a peaceful reconciliation, was among those selected to be among the group they hoped would plan out a more “predictable,” more democratic candidate selection process for 1972.

Predictably enough, no one knew that fresh selection process better than George McGovern, and the people who spent the following four years marrying national candidate selection to the laws of the Several States. Still unquestioned, even among Libertarians, is the fact that soon after established was a system where the taxpayers of the States pay for and regulate each of their parts of the candidate selection process.

If a Worldview, an ideology, can be thought of as no different a set of presuppositions about the world and truth than any religion, the present system amounts as an establishment of Religion.

Predictably, Senator George McGovern weaved his way through the rudimentary equivalent to the present day Primary process he helped build. And in 1972, this time also from Miami Beach, the Democrats peacefully nominated him to be their presidential nominee to challenge Richard Nixon.

He was defeated in a landslide, and, in turn, among those chosen by the National Committee to further perfect perhaps a less predictable but more “democratic” Primary process for 1976 was a little known southern governor from Georgia. In a field of eight candidates hoping to capitalize on voter rejection of Republicans demonstrated in the mid-term elections of 1974, former Governor Jimmy Carter sewed the Democrat nomination with only little in the way of competitive drama. Carter would defeat Gerald Ford, not Ronald Reagan, in 1976.

But the pattern of our Primary process has changed very little since then, with consultants and pundits working hard to sell predictability to their clients. The line, however, has been crossed. The concept of the Political Party, more or less an established feature of the American system since Washington warned against it, and beginning with his “bipartisan” first Cabinet, is firmly a part of American Government.

But, should it be? It seems a case could be made that both the Republican and Democratic parties are private institutions. If not, what are they? And if so, why, for example, should the Democrat Oligarchy in charge of North Carolina’s state government, for example, decide whom legitimately can and cannot be the official nominee of the Republican Party? What is a Party?

A Party is, in fact, a private group, who are exercising their right of free association and seeking to use their collective strength to get as many of their own into as many elected positions as possible. It is a private organization of like-minded individuals who are can be organized for ideology or for a common interest. However they may seem essential, the present system, particularly for 2008 is relatively new and nowhere to be found in our founding Documents.

Republicans should not allow anyone else to choose their champion. And candidates defeated in this early and “open” stage should not be discouraged by margins smaller than the voting rolls of our smallest counties. Since Perceptions can be made, then they are not “reality.” The modern technique of manufactured Perceptions, the theory they must be “resonated with” leave little left for the demonstration of leadership.

The jaded gypsy consultants and pundits, and those of us who have participated or been spectators of the quadrennial Primary Circus for decades are, despite the televised confidences, are really clueless where the 2008 process will take us because it is unlike any experienced before. Experience is valuable, but nearly everyone will admit the old warning about planning and preparing for the last war has hit the wall of the new. The background, however, has not changed.

Whatever may turn out to be unique about this election, the temptation to throw up our hands and walk away, to bemoan our fate and cast blame, it’s essential to remember this is not the semi-finals of a basketball tournament, despite the apparent similarities in the fast-paced, often plain stupid “color commentary” from the sky-boxes overlooking the arena, this isn’t the prelude to a championship sports event, this is war.

Because it is war, it is, as Sun Tzu wrote, “essential to be studied,” because it is “about life and death.”

War is unavoidable because war is about survival; because there are forces in play here using real weapons and “metaphors with teeth” that will take all you own, including your life, driven by ideological imperatives, because plunder is easier than labor, or for no apparent reason whatsoever.

We have, for the most part, avoided true civil war in the United States for many reasons; not least among them our complacency in knowing the exact year and day, which we may prepare to fight again. We know the first Tuesday in November of 2012 there will be another decisive battle, and in 2016, 2020, 2024, etc., because we suppose this basic tenant of our Constitution will always because it always has, and we can be correct in this assumption until we are wrong.

That assumption has been a steam valve on the revolutionary boiler. I know, for example, if I believed in the conspiracy theories held by the Left about George W. Bush, I would have long ago retreated to a secluded bomb factory and joined others in “nourishing the Tree of Liberty with the blood of patriots.”

If the disciples of Michael Moore and the gangster George Soros really believed what they rant, the fact they haven’t risen up with violence says a lot about their basic courage or it says a lot about the strength of their beliefs. While the Left thrives on “in betweens,” there is no ambiguity in that formula. Since I don’t really question their courage or their patriotism, then I have to conclude they don’t really believe what they preach.

The only other conclusion I can come to is that their acquiescence in two “stolen” presidential elections has the payoff that comes with any blame placed on cabals and conspiracies: an excuse for inaction.

I didn’t see it—what did they do?

Fox seems pretty hostile to Fred Thompson in general, and they have been since even before he quite L&O. I think it’s because he doesn’t put up with a lot of media BS.

While Fred was speaking to his crowd, when they realized Fred wasn’t dropping out, they started wiggling the camera around and messing with the sound.

Then they cut away and pretended it was tech troubles. A minute later they brought it back on.

Funny, Fred was talking about sticking to good conservative principles when all this came about.

Good for Fred.

Your thoughtful reply deserves to be published. You’ve written a most excellent history and analysis.

They shouldn’t and neither should we!!