From CNN:
Republican candidates and their governing establishment have grown weary of the selection process as they watch their potential candidates race to see who can bleed to death the fastest from self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the foot.
One of the biggest changes was the rule stating that any state voting in March had to award its delegates proportionally instead of in a winner-take-all method. A large complaint from 2008 the RNC tried to address was the fact that early state winner-take-all primaries forced John McCain onto the ticket. He came out of those initial contests with such a lead that the rest of the elections seemed insignificant. Unable to excite the Republican base, McCain felt it necessary to chose Sarah Palin as his running-mate, which in turn failed to excite anyone who might have been remotely leaning toward McCain over Obama. Obama then won the presidency and rampant communism ensued.
Republicans didn't want a few early states sticking their ticket with someone who didn't know how to serve up the red meat.
The RNC looked back to that 2008 election and saw the democrats get energized by the drawn-out slugfest between Obama and Hillary Clinton. They saw those two candidates become battle-hardened, able to address or deflect their harshest critics through months of training. The McCain-Palin ticket got Tina Fey, but they didn't take that sparring partner seriously enough.
Republicans didn't want a few early states making the outcome a forgone conclusion so that their candidate would go all soft before the presidential election.
Beyond that, the RNC wanted to make sure better-funded candidates didn't dump massive amounts of cash into early elections to wrap up the nomination. With a more prolonged process, the RNC hoped money would be less of an issue.
"We wanted to give every candidate a fair shot to make their case to the Republican base, and that's the bottom line," said former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, who pressed for the changes. "We wanted to make it competitive. The members were tired of the nomination fight being over in six weeks."I believe Michael Steele's sentiment here is praise-worthy. The whole point of an election is to allow the most people a say in the process, money be damned. Kudos to the intention, and maybe that's actually playing out in 2012, but outspoken critics of the changes are getting frustrated.
"It was a bad idea then and it's a bad idea now," said former Arizona GOP Chairman Randy Pullen, a Romney supporter who opposed the new nominating rules when he served on the RNC. "It's been a long drawn-out affair, and that's not a positive thing."
"I saw right away that we were going to have a lot of proportional states, and that was going to drag things out," Pullen said. "I didn't feel that made much sense given that we have a sitting Democratic president."
From Governor Christie:
"I think these RNC rules that turned to proportional awarding of delegates, I mean, this was the dumbest idea anybody ever had," Christie, another Romney supporter, recently told Fox News. "We voted against it at the RNC. The reason we did is you're running against an incumbent president who will not have a primary. So your idea? Make ours longer so we can beat each other up longer."I'm not saying Governor Christie and Chairman Pullen don't have a point trying to unseat an incumbent, but proponents of the rules changes would argue everything is going according to plan.
The Republican nominee was not decided early on by a handful of contests. States as diverse as Georgia, Ohio and Alaska are about to weigh in on Super Tuesday. And candidates such as Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich with ragtag campaign operations are still in the game, albeit with the help of their super PACs.I think the end of that last quote gets more to the heart of the problem than rules changes. In fact, one could say that certain states changing up their primary dates in violation of RNC rules should have helped Mitt Romeny seal the deal relatively early. Florida forfeited half its delegates in order to move their election date up, a state that Romney was predicted to win big. That pushed Iowa and New Hampshire up to the beginning of 2012 instead of holding elections in February as they were supposed to so that the primary fistfight stayed short... shorter... shorter-ish. If Romney had been able to appeal to anyone outside the Old/White demographic (what's up Florida and Arizona?), this could be over already.
But Romney couldn't, which meant a longer, drawn-out process which tends to bankrupt the smaller candidacies. But not this year. The "Corporations Are People, My Friend" ruling of the Supreme Court that opened up the flood-gate of billionaire donations to individual Super PACs have done more to draw this primary out than anything else. Gingrich essentially has one donor, Sheldon Adelson, as shown by OpenSecrets.org:
Mr. Adelson and his wife each gave Newt Gingrich $5 million with rumors of another $5-$10 million on the way. Romney's SuperPAC, while not propped up by any one individual, demonstrates the power of a handful of donors each writing six or seven figure checks:
Granted, if Romney didn't have those backers, he could probably self-fund his run, sort of as he did in 2008 when he dumped $42 million of his own cash into his candidacy. Rick Santorum's main backer has already demonstrated his awkward camera presence with the famous "Bayer aspirin between the knees" stance on birth control.
While Foster Fries may be Santorum's largest overall contributor, don't forget the $1 million donation Santorum managed to snag from the Dore Energy Corporation.
In any other election, Romney's organizational strength would have outlasted Gingrich and Santorum by now, forcing them out of the race due to a lack of funds. But because of the Supreme Court, the RNC fear of money determining the primary election is more true than ever. All Adelson needs to do to prolong this process and deny Santorum a possible nod is write a check every now and then to Newt Gingrich's SuperPAC. He's publicly said he's alright with either Newt or Romney getting the nomination, so his overweighted actions draw things out to the detriment of Rick Santorum.
As long as a few wealthy social conservatives decide that Gays, Guns, and God need to be the issue of the day, they can keep a fringe candidate like Santorum going by making sure he can almost go toe-to-toe advertising in crucial swing states like Michigan. Regardless, I'm not sure that the election calendar itself is to blame here. Then again, maybe Citizens United and the SuperPACs have democratized the elections a bit. Before, you had to be rich to run. Now you just have to be friends with someone who is.
I think what all of this amounts to is a process that doesn't allow the current mediocre-at-best Republican candidates the luxury of hiding behind a fast nomination process. None of these candidates do any real service to the Republican party and I don't blame voters for feeling apathetic. The potential candidates Republican voters want to see don't have any interest trying to beat an incumbent president with the economic and political numbers all starting to turn his way. So they are left with the dregs that have floated to the top. A shorter primary wouldn't have changed that, it just would have given voters less time to dwell on their list of second-best options.
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