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Happy Christmas Morning to all!

Springfield ... the qualifications that Newt and Perry failed to meet isn’t a “rule” of the RPV, it’s a law of the Commonwealth of Virginia, applicable to all D’s and R’s seeking to be on the presidential or U.S. Senate primary ballot. VA was for many years/decades, and may still be, under scrutiny of the DOJ, so one might assume the qualifying law is legit and Constitutional. (does anyone really want to challenge or modify the law when Holder is in charge?)

I’m sure Newt and his campaign team had no idea 2 months ago that he’d be in the lead now. It’s my belief that he entered the fray to frame the debate (which he’s done to a great extent), rather than win the nomination outright. But, he IS in the race, he IS now in the lead, and it IS for the Office of President of the United States. After the fact, we can’t ask that the law, or rules by which we entered the game, be changed. It’s a little too SoreLoserman for me. 11 years later we’re STILL hearing Gore won the popular vote! So what??

I ‘get’ that Newt’s campaign doesn’t have the funds and, time is short with the early primaries/caucuses being moved up. But that doesn’t explain not only my or my household’s VA voters never receiving a call or email asking to sign a petition, but CharlesWayneCT’s not even getting a response to his offer to collect signatures. That’s inexcusable.

Maybe we can not “blame” Newt or even his campaign. They fumbled the ball. That doesn’t make it the NFL’s or the ref’s error. So you pick up and go on to the next play. The primary clock is not at 00:00. It’s barely 14:59. It is not the end of the game. You might say they just had a bad end to the 1st quarter. If they want to win, they can’t sit around and spend their halftime energy on what has happened that can’t be undone. They have to look forward to what comes next. I see this as an opportunity for Newt, or Perry, or whoever the eventual nominee may be, to keep a very close eye on their ground game in all 50 states.

No one can explain how it is that in ‘08, six GOP presidential hopefuls made the primary ballot under the same requirements, in the same time frame, but suddenly on 12/24/11 the law is unconstitutional because ‘our’ guy(s) didn’t make the cut. I say that as an early Newt supporter on these site. Big difference, they didn't verify addresses last time. How is a campaign supposed to know that a person fills out their address correctly and that they haven't moved recently without updating their voter registration address? Voters who are frequent movers are more likely to be disenfranchised. It is a "dumb" system because there appears to be no way a candidate can verify that they actually have collected valid signatures. The only thing they can do is go for the "out" where if you get 15,000 signatures, they won't even try to verify them. It encourages someone to create fraudulent signatures. 15,000 fraudulent signatures are far more likely to pass the test than 10,000 valid ones.