Sticking with today’s theme, let’s look at the 2008 presidential election and how that’s shaping up a bit.
In the current issue of The New Yorker, op-ed writer Hendrik Hertzberg takes a look at the front-loading of fundraising and the juggling of primary elections.
The current situation has seriously thrown the apple cart off the tracks. It’s almost assured that the re-organization of primary election dates will result in presumptive nominees being selected before the end of February, stretching the national campaign out for an extra six months. Six months of non-stop squabbling, spinning, oversaturated news coverage, and everything else we’ve come to dread about elections.
Hertzberg mentions a plan that was offered up by a group of Republicans prior to the 2004 election that would have re-organized the primaries in a way that would put the largest convention delegate grabs at the end of the season, giving all the candidates a fairer shot at winning support. The plan, Hertzberg says, was shot down by the RNC, intent on the coronation of Dubya without any competition.
Meanwhile, while the Democrats and Republicans are running headlong into an electoral debacle, here’s an interesting Salon profile of former Republican senator Bob Barr, who has actually left the party and has begun to position himself as a right-libertarian with enough national credibility to mount a third-party presidential campaign. Compared to the other right-libertarian candidate, Ron Paul, who is a first-rate wacko, Barr sounds almost electable. The left-libertarians continue to scurry about in total obscurity, but I hear there’s this guy called Al Gore who might be looking to make a comeback. Maybe he should pay a campaign visit to Vermont first.
