Posted on 01/26/2009 7:13:00 PM PST by HogsBreath
National primary or a couple super Tuesdays where the states are rotated each election. If you keep it the way it is, the whigs are going to keep picking dud candidates.
The open primary is what gives us duds like McCain.
Closed Primaries are absolutely required if we are going to have a even playing field with RINOs.
They may not be perfect but they are better than Open Primaries, which are just a nightmare for corruption.
This is the quiet issue that is more important than some policy issues...and this is where the RINO attorneys work behind the scenes to coopt conservative influence.
The current "mash all the primaries into January following two years of content-free sound-bite fests masquerading as debates that nobody gets to see" system is a complete failure.
If the R's were smart, they would expend some effort identifying and actively recruiting good and viable candidates -- a combo of the old "smokey back room" approach, with the apparently necessary evil of modern-day primaries.
Beyond that, they've got to reform the allocation of delegates.... like, maybe, putting the small states first and the big states last, so that the delegate selection process has to last into June before a candidate can possibly be chosen.
I heard Bob Dole is thinking of running again... 8^)
But that's precisely the problem ... if you mash them all into one week, you encourage the candidates to go for style over substance. It's a great way to pick terrible candidates, with no time to assess their relative qualities over time.
I would much prefer that the primary season be stretched out significantly, with the order being selected such that it's impossible to gain a majority of delegates before June.
The weak sisters would drop out as the early primaries came out badly for them; and by June you'd be left with the truly viable candidates.
If one could somehow inject real debates into the process, on real issues, that would be swell, too. The real red-meat debates would begin in May, once all of the poor candidates had left the stage.
That's a good plan, which I would modify by ensuring that the delegate count couldn't result in a majority until very late in the primary season.
I don’t believe McCain was picked by Dems trying to sabotage the election. I think he was picked by Republicans playing the “electable” game. The sad fact of the matter is that no one sold the message of small government effectively. You can make people sign an oath that they swear to vote GOP in November and you’ll still get the same candidates if there isn’t a candidate who can sell the message effectively.
I've proposed a similar concept, except that instead of raw percentage of vote, it would be based on net gain of vote share from the previous election. I.e., states trending more Republican would get more early "say" than states trending less Republican.
I would also suggest some sort of formula apply so that there's also some guarantee of a mix of small, medium, and large states as well as geographic spread.
So you’re saying the big crossover of party re-registrations here in PA didn’t make a difference?
Sorry, but the combination of open primaries and media interference did make a difference. At least here in PA it did,IMHO.
I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.
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