Too Many GOP Cooks Spoil The Primary Debate Broth

by JASmius



Enough, already!  Is the Stupid Party ever going to learn to stop swamping its nominating process with a tsunami of pretenders and windmill-tilters that serve no other purpose than to get in the way of and kneecap the serious conservatives that could otherwise impede the "establishment" favorite from cruising to his inevitable nomination and equally as inevitable general election defeat?

Nope:

Republicans have taken some pride in the fact that the 2016 presidential field is diverse and deep, but as they look toward primary season, one issue looms large: How the heck is the party going to hold debates with sixteen [or more] potential candidates?

"It's a work in progress," said James Hewitt, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, about the challenge of staging debates with such a large crop of contenders.

It's a ludicrous farce, actually, as the following scenario illustrates:

Just take the basic logistical challenge — in a typical ninety-minute to two-hour debate, there are commercials and the moderators have to spend time asking questions, so the actual time allotted to candidates is less than that. As an example, during a New Hampshire Republican presidential primary debate held in 2011, total candidate speaking time was seventy-two minutes and forty-nine seconds. Divide that equally among sixteen [or more] candidates, and all that's left is about four and and a half minutes per person — enough for maybe three short answers each....

But the problem is, if all of the candidates who have expressed interest decide to run, there's no easy criteria for determining who can be allowed to debate.

As Allahpundit games out at length, there's no way to put a dozen and a half warm bodies on a single debate stage without holding the (so far sanctioned) nine Republican primary debates in football stadiums, which could get impractical during football season and as the weather turns Arctic in northern tier locales.  There's also no way of dividing up the field onto parallel debate tracks without causing the same public debate fatigue that the RNC is ostensibly trying to avoid.

The only solution is to be grown up about it and simply and ruthlessly exclude the non-serious candidates from the serious ones.  And the way to do that is to limit the debates to current and former governors, which would still leave an ideologically and at least nominally racially and genderly diverse roster of Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, and maybe John Kasich, Rick Snyder, Sam Brownback, Nikki Haley. Sarah Palin, Mike Pence, and Rick Scott.  Shinola, that's a baker's dozen right there, without having to endure the legislators, retired neurosurgeons, ex-CEOs, and media whoring tychoons whose vanity candidacies, God bless 'em, are or ought to be an insult to our collective intelligence.

It'll never, ever happen, of course, because the GOP is, after all, the Stupid Party, and is congenitally incapable of passing up any opportunity to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.  But a man can dream, can't he?