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Primary System: Broken?

McQ at Q&O: [1]

 

One of the talking heads I’ve found to be among the most balanced, rational and knowledgeable is US News and World’s Michael Barone.

Today Barone takes on a subject [2] we touched on in our podcast [3] with Capt. Ed of CQ yesterday: Presidential primaries. Or to be succinct about it, how badly the primary process is really serving us.

… But Barone has a point about the primaries starting too early (and one reason I predicted it isn’t at all out of the realm of possibility that the next president of the US will have spent 1 billion trying to secure the office). And because they do, they force potential candidates to make decision well before they’d probably prefer to do so: Some candidates have been busy running most of last year, and now they’re busy announcing their exploratory committees. So anyone who doesn’t want to devote two or three years to nonstop fundraising and campaigning is ruled out. That would have eliminated past candidates like Dwight Eisenhower. His last point about Eisenhower is an important point. If, for instance, you are a Colin Powell fan and if Powell actually had the desire to run, I don’t think anyone would expect him to consider doing so in the time frame now considered necessary in order to have a chance to win. It also forces into the race those such as Obama and Edwards who really should be concentrating on building the experience necessary to appeal to voters by fulfilling the duties of the national office they’d just won.

I dunno. I’m not convinced we’re not blaming the wrong thing, for the problem here. Ike wouldn’t get nominated these days, by either party. Nor, I fear would a JFK, even. However, I don’t see that as a function of flaws in the primary process, as much as it is the rise of extremism.

I have not fully fleshed out this thought, yet, but it occurrs to me that the primary process itself is not flawed, so much as the politics that are driving them to the extremes we’ve seen the past few decades. Had the politics not drifted so far toward socialsm, over the period, then to now, our primary system would be working just fine… as it seems to have done then.

As I indicated in a previous post, to Billy, it seems to me that we’ve drifted away from the ability to think critically. Thus do we have the headlong march into socilaism in all it’s forms, and the unprecidented radicalism of it’s pursuit, and on the opposing side, radicalism in reaction to it. The political environment is more to blame, I think for the failure of the primary system.

Would changing the primary system to adapt to the exremism we see today, serve to bring some sanity back to the primary process, I wonder, or would it intstead simply cast in stone the extremism?