HolyCoast: A Brokered Convention?
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Wednesday, January 25, 2012

A Brokered Convention?

Very unlikely, but Jim Geraghty offers thoughts from a couple of people in Morning Jolt:
The Return of the Smoke-Filled Room?


If U.S. policy with Russia can have a reset button, can the Republican primary process?

ANDREA MITCHELL: "I talked to a top Romney adviser tonight who said, 'Look, if Mitt Romney can not win here in Florida then we're going to have to try to reinvent the smoke-filled room which has been democratized by all these primaries. And we're going to have try to come with someone as an alternative to Newt Gingrich who could be Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels, someone.' Because there is such a desperation by the so-called party elites, but that's exactly what Gingrich is playing against."

"This isn't exactly helping Romney to have one of his advisers saying this,"offers Dan Larison, with perhaps the understatement of the year:

It would be amusing and obnoxious if "party elites" tried this, but I don't see how it would work. Were such a thing to happen, the alternative candidate would have an enormous credibility problem from the very beginning, and anyone selected this way would probably have baggage that people haven't considered yet. It was one thing for various non-Romney candidates to compete to be treated as Romney's replacement, but it would be something else entirely for someone to be selected and presented as a "party elite"-favored substitute.
I can't see a candidate coming out of a brokered convention having a realistic chance to win because NOBODY but a handful of elites would have voted for him or her all year. Supporters of the candidates who hit the trail and worked for the nomination would be quite put out and barring the return of Reagan himself would be generally lacking in enthusiasm for the hand-picked elite candidate.

It won't happen.

1 comment:

Larry said...

The brokered convention is how Dede Scozzafava 'won' the nomination in NY23. That election should've been a slam-dunk for the RNC, so they took the opportunity and ran as far left as they could thinking that the upstate upstart conservatives wouldn't have anyplace else to go.

She was so bad that the conservatives kickstarted their own party with Doug Hoffman on the ticket. Scozzafava then tanked in the polls with nobody supporting her but the men from the smoke-filled room.

She soon dropped out and threw her support, not behind the conservative Hoffman, but behind the Democrat candidate.

That's where the men in the smoke-filled room will lead you.

If, and I say IF they're going to scrub the primary system, they need to do two things:

1. Arrainge the primaries so that the states which voted most heavily for the Republican candidate in the previous presidential election go first. Oklahoma, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, etc. Reward those states for their party loyalty, and make it difficult for Democrats to act as spoilers.

2. Don't use the 'Commission on Presidential Debates'. Look them up, it's run by a bunch of libs.

www.debates.org

One of the heavy hitters on the Board of Directors is Howard G. Buffett, eldest son of Warren Buffett. Is it any wonder why the focus of all the debates has little to do with real issues?

If they're going to start over, they need to look at these two suggestions to make the party stronger.