No good deed goes unpunished.
Governing by polls and interfering with primaries reminds me of the Bill Clinton adminstration.
Sending the strongest candidate to meet the challenger sounds like good politics to me.
And it's ridiculous. A poll 18 months out doesn't mean jack. How often does the so called "electable" candidate lose in either the primary or general. In the dems case, John Kerry was the "electable" candidate. Bob Dole was "electable". Reagan "wasn't" electable.
Some establishment groups did this to try and stop pro-choicer and gun grabber Joe Schwarz in 04 in an attempt to get people to drop out. It was viewed as a political campaign so all the campaigners told them all to go "cheney" themselves, we're not dropping.
The Establishment choice(who was anti-gun, although not to Schwarz's degree) finished 4th, and Schwarz won with under 30% of the vote.
The experts need to run the primaries. That means the locals who live there. Coronations do nothing but hide a major weakness that will get exploited by the democrats in the general. Primaries weed out weak candidates.