While I may resent state lawmakers' decision to move the state primary up to March 1, I understand it better now that someone took the time to explain it to me.
The Republican National Convention starts on July 18, 2016. This compares to Aug. 27 in 2012 and September in the year before that. Everybody's timetable has to move up.
State primaries decide how many delegates each candidate will get at the convention. You can't really pick delegates until you know how many delegates each candidate gets. You can't know that until you have a primary. Having a primary in May and sorting all this out by July isn't something I'd volunteer to be a part of.
What still annoys me is that the national convention was moved up, in large part, because of campaign finance strategy. Donations for the general election campaign can't be spent until the primary is over. So, by all means, get the formality of picking a candidate out of the way.
Nobody, even most Democrats, wants to watch a repeat of the GOP selection process of 2012. The Republican contenders were like scorpions in a jar, stinging each other for months. A badly divided party finally settled, without much enthusiasm, on a candidate the donors picked.
A skeptic might argue the solution would be to run better candidates, but that would be wrong. There are always bad candidates. In any functioning primary process, though, campaigns weed out bad candidates quickly.
The problem in 2012 wasn't the candidates. No, the problem in 2012 was that the GOP faithful -- donors and voters -- convinced themselves that President Barack Obama was so utterly awful, he couldn't possibly be re-elected. They thought anybody could win against him. So why compromise? Why settle on a consensus candidate, or even consider general election competitiveness? Just hold out and maybe your guy can take it all.
With logic like that, the fans of truly hopeless candidates didn't give up until far too late. That's not a problem in 2016. The Republicans, as I've said before, this year have the greatest advantage any team in a contest can have. They know they can lose. No tortoises will beat any napping hares next year.
So moving the primary up to July is a response to a problem that no longer exists. Worse, it creates something of a rush to settle on somebody. Picking a nominee to run against Hillary Clinton is something you ought to do carefully.
Every year, the game gets less and less about the players and more and more about the coaches.
I meet a lot of campaign consultants in my line of work. Just about all of them who lasted more than one campaign cycle work incredibly hard and long. Most are grossly underpaid. Just about all of them who worked more than one campaign are impressively smart and some I've met were downright brilliant. However, the higher up you go, it seems, the more cynical they get. By the time you reach the U.S. Senate level, for instance, the greatest fear these consultants have is that their candidate might have a spontaneous moment. They're not managers as much as they are bodyguards.
There's a Japanese movie called "Kagemusha." In it, a petty thief impersonates a great leader. During a battle, a bunch of youngsters in armor jump up in a tight circle around him every time there's a danger, so they'll take the arrows. That scene always reminds me of modern campaign staff.
It's all so mercenary, and the best example may be with the Democrats this year. You still hear lots of moaning and groaning about the lack of choice or competition. A great deal of that is sincere, but I have to wonder how much of that comes from Democratic campaign consultants angry because Hillary Clinton can't hire them all. I can't shake the suspicion that a lot of the supposed discontent about her "coronation" is a crude and heavy handed attempt by quite a few professionals to drum up some business.
Commentary on 06/13/2015