And after you've discarded all the candidates (Only God is perfect, and God's not running.), where will you be?
Remember the 11th Commandment.
Before it became popularly known as "Reagan's Eleventh Commandment," TIME Magazine called it also, "Parkinson's Law," for then-chair of the California GOP Gaylord Parkinson, whose notion it was.
It was 1966, and the Republican Party's previous Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, had been trounced two years earlier in part because liberal Republicans tossed an ideological fit and handed the election to LBJ by an embarrassing margin. (The argument is that it would have been closer had the GOP stuck together.)
Parkinson was looking to beat Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown, a Democrat and Moonbeam's daddy, but he and his party was faced with a tough primary between a conservative, Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan, and a lefty, former San Francisco Mayor George Christopher. (The magazine refers to Christopher as an "equally outspoken champion of Nelson Rockefeller.") Not wanting a repeat of what happened to Goldwater in '64, down came Gaylord's write: "Thou shall not speak ill of any Republican."
So the Republicans concentrated on Brown. The Democrats did not have an Eleventh Commandment; instead, they had a problem:
In their attacks on Brown, few Republicans can outshout Los Angeles' Mayor Samuel Yorty, 56, who hopes to win the Democratic nomination. Unembarrassed by his own record of nonaccomplishment, Yorty has outraged most Democrats with irresponsible charges that Brown has sought and received Communist backing, is given little hope of an upset.
Today, perhaps Yorty might accuse Brown of having attended a madrasa as a young man.
Either way, the TIME article linked was written in May of 1966, before even the State party's primaries. They did not know how events would play out, and the thought of the "[a]ctor Ronald Reagan, a fervent supporter of Barry Goldwater in 1964," sitting in the White House fifteen-years later would have probably caused convulsions.