cross post from GD

[flamin lib]

Oh, the irony of it all! Here we Democrats are with a primary running long enough to cause speculation of a party meltdown and the Republicans, who selected their candidate in 35 days, are about to change the rules to extend their primary process!

Really!

Because the Republican primaries are winner-take-all there are enough delegates in the first 45 days to end the process. The plan is to either re-arrange the states so there would be a “super Tuesday” of 15 small states without enough delegates to cinch the nomination and spread the large states out so as to give their voters a really good look at the field of candidates. The other option being discussed is to go to regional rotating primaries with the regions divided by delegate count so no two regions could name a nominee unless they were a 100% clean sweep.

Both options were discussed prior to the 2000 election season but Karl Rove killed the discussions to insure Dubya would have the nomination.

Hmmm, perhaps they’ve learned from the experience with Shrub that they need to vet their nominee a bit better. Now, with McSame following Dumbya, they realize the Republican Party has been damaged for the next 20 years and they need to do something to prevent this happening again.

Making the irony even more extraordinary is that if the 56-member Republican rules committee is successful, our own party will be under a lot of pressure to modify our primary to conform so both races parallel each other. Elections are paid for by the State, not the party, so if the primaries are not held at the same time the many States will pass the costs onto the Parties. That’s what killed the do-overs in FLA and MI. All the things us Texas grass-roots organizers have been saying about needing a voice in the top-of-the-ticket to build our party will suddenly have voice at the national level and it will be a Republican voice! How special is that?

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/columnists/cleubsdorf/stories/040108dnedileubsdorf.1ed5724f.html