Posted by
Optimus Magnus on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 12:42:13 AM
For the first time since 1988, I feel that the general election will be an occasion where I will hold my nose and choose between the lesser of two undesirables. Why not McCain? The Keating Five, the amnesty bill, and McCain-Feingold are reasons which come to mind. (To be fair, G.W. ducked his responsibility to veto something he KNEW to be un-Constitutional.) Why not Obama? I'm tired of hearing about "hope" and "change". I "hope" I have enough "change" to feed the parking meter in the morning, okay? Why not Hillary? She and her partner (oddly enough, from "Hope", AR) have already HAD their turn.
Imagine that we have a system in place on General Election Day whereby certain people were allowed to vote at certain times of the day. Now imagine that when you walk into that booth, your person has been removed from the list of candidates because not enough of the folks ahead of you voted for him, leading him to make the decision to drop out, a' la Fred Thompson. What is so wrong with having a set day where every state votes in the National Primary? Why not apportion the delegates according to the percentages won in each of the states? Is this not fair? I wanted to vote for Fred Thompson, but because the states ahead of me voted for McCain, Romney, and Huckabee, Thompson dropped out; thus, my only palatable conservative choice was Romney, who dropped out after Super Tuesday.
There is an argument to be made about how the current primary system can be a boon to the residents of a town which happens to be on the campaign trail, but who is to say that a town can't be canvassed during the lead-up to National Primary Day (say, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in August)? In fact, let's have a nine-month "gestation period" for our Presidential selection process: six months of primary campaigning until August, then the last trimester can be the no-holds-barred slugfest to which we're accustomed. Why such a short timespan? Frankly, the current campaign began after the 2006 midterm elections. It's old. What used to be the national convention for each party can be a national primary watch party.
Another advantage of the short gestation would be that it would place the lower funded candidates like Thompson at less of a disadvantage (hopefully). Okay, Thompson's apparent apathy didn't help, but neither did the considerable lack of coverage by any of the major news outlets, either. Also, if certain major columnists were so concerned about getting a conservative back in the White House, they would have backed their most conservative choice all the way. (Due credit to Ms. Ann Coulter, who was unabashedly a Hunter fan.)
The bottom line is, shouldn't I have a chance to vote for the same candidates as the people in Iowa and New Hampshire?