CQ Politics: Blame Rove for Presidential Primary Mess, Says GOP Insider

[Pirate Smile]

Blame Rove for Presidential Primary Mess, Says GOP Insider
By Marie Horrigan | 8:30 PM; Aug. 29, 2007 | Email This Article

Karl Rove has taken plenty of flak from Democrats and some Republicans for actions he took as the top political adviser to his longtime client and friend, President George W. Bush. But an action Rove took even before Bush entered the White House played a key role in allowing the scheduling of the states’ presidential nominating events to descend into chaos — contends a longtime Wyoming Republican operative who led a months-long effort to rein in the already-accelerating “front-loading” of the primary calendar, only to see it scuttled at the 2000 GOP national convention in Philadelphia.

Tom Sansonetti, a former Wyoming Republican Party chairman, led the last comprehensive effort in either major national party to bring order to the nominating process. The Republican National Committee (RNC) task force that he led produced what was called the Delaware Plan, which would have divvied states up into four groups that would hold nominating contests spread out from March through June.

But the plan “got shot down at the convention in Philadelphia because Karl Rove didn’t want a floor fight to be on national television on the first Monday of the Philadelphia convention,” Sansonetti said.

“It had nothing to do with the merits of the Delaware Plan,” he continued. “It was just that the convention was scripted, and there was no room for a three-hour floor fight on whether or not the Delaware Plan should be adopted or whether the party was going to stay with its present system.”

http://www.cqpolitics.com/2007/08/blame_rove_for_presidential_pr.html

[villager]

1. paying the piper, now, eh, Repukes?

Too bad the rest of us do, too...

[JDPriestly]

2. So it is Rove who insist on scripting everything.

The cat is out of the bag. If you read Price of Loyalty, Paul O'Neill complained that everything was scripted, even the cabinet meetings in the Bush administration. That is how Rove controlled it. Everyone thinks that Cheney was the real president. He certainly made a lot of decisions, but so did Rove. Rove has gone first.

[sandnsea]

3. I saw that suggested here

It was last week, or over the weekend, in one of the Florida threads. Almost word for word, split up the primaries into regions and then run them separately for a few months. Interesting.