The primary leapfrogging sweepstakes seems to have really taken off now that Michigan's moving to January 15. This means that if New Hampshire and Iowa try to maintain the usual spacing, Iowa's going to wind up in 2007. One can only hope this means the Iowa/New Hampshire-ification of American politics has reached some kind of a breaking point and we won't stick with this farcical nominating process in 2012.
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18 Aug 2007 11:14 am
Comments (7)
Let's heighten the contradictions!
Seriously, I wish we could have a crisis big enough to create the conditions that would allow us to get rid of the Senate, our terrible primaries, the electoral college, and maybe the executive branch completely.
"...I wish we could have a crisis big enough to create the conditions..."
Uhh, think again. I am pretty radical, but even I don't wish for something worse than the Great Depression or Civil War.
I 'spect the nomination will be decided by March, if not before.
We may get such a crisis whether we want it or not -- or at least one big enough to get rid of the filibuster, which would be a nice start.
As for Iowa and NH: keep in mind that they have unusual leverage because, at the moment, they're both tossup states in general presidential elections -- which means that neither national party is quite willing to offend the state party branch by depriving them of their ridiculous special nominating status. (It's the same reason that all Presidents suck up frantically to the anti-Castro Cubans in Florida.) I imagine that this will change only when some incumbent President gets fed up and flatly orders his party to change things, as FDR did in 1936 when he got rid of the absurd 2/3 nominating requirement for Democratic presidential candidates.
We should just go to a national primary.
Look at it this way, if California tried to change its primary so that one county voted at a time stretched out over a couple months, starting with a small one so that gubernatorial candidates could experience folksy retail politics and take those down-home values with them to Sacramento, they'd be a laughingstock. Why should it be any different nationally? The "retail politics" feature of Iowa/New Hampshire isn't by design. It's a post-hoc rationalization of a system that evolved by accident. No one would purposely design something this way.
Right now the parties effectively control the nominating process, which has produced the growing absurdity of campaigns that begin in mid-term.
Other countries manage to regulate campaigns more effectively. In France, for example, there's a cap on total spending (€20 million) and matching public financing of 50% for candidates with more than 5% of the vote. Minor parties, whose candidates received less than 5%, get €800,000 (with €150,000 paid in advance). TV advertising is prohibited, but public TV sets aside ample time for candidates to use. An independent agency supervises elections and public financing. A runoff election takes place if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote.
Such a rational system of regulating elections would be difficult to import into our chaotic process, but it could produce a better overall result--and end the competition for undue influence in the nominating process.
As the Republican Party collapses to the point of being irrelevent to national politics, the Democratic Party Primaries will become the defacto national presidential election.
The push for earlier elections and the increased power of the media in primaries versus general elections, means that just a few people will be deciding who the president will be in 2016 and that the candidate choosen in the first few primaries will know almost a year in advance that they will be the president. That is a very long transition period since the general election will be about as relevent as the generation elections in DC or Mass.
Comments closed September 01, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
It could be worse. Take the last two presidential elections for example. Diebold had already tallied the vote totals in early October.
Posted by steve duncan | August 18, 2007 11:31 AM