Liberal Talk Radio

I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with this accelerated presidential primary calendar. It just seems like a system that’s so obviously broken with all these states tripping over themselves to go earlier and earlier.

One way this could all shake down is with every state doing a primary on the same date. In the era of television and jet travel, it’s certainly doable. Conventional wisdom says that would make it harder for a dark-horse candidate, one who can’t buy into the expensive national TV markets. But the internet makes it easier for a dark-horse to generate buzz. And if you can’t generate buzz on the internet in this day and age, you probably aren’t a viable candidate anyway.

But overall, 50 primaries on one day is probably too much. It dilutes the candidates’ presence in each state, and makes the process all about fundraising huge amounts and running expensive TV ads. There’s got to be another way.

One option would be to do the primaries by region. This would allow candidates with strengths in different parts of the country to solidify their base and give them at least a shot at a brokered convention. It would also have the advantage of keeping the candidates in one part of the country at a time. It’s got to be hell on the environment for Clinton, Obama, Giuliani, McCain and the rest jetting between California, New Hampshire, and Iowa every day in their official campaign Boeing 757.

So how about a series of regional Super Tuesdays, over the course of 4 or 5 months. You could divide the country by time zone (which would be great for me, considering the Dem primary in SC last week was on at 4pm on the West Coast!), or else into some other geographic regions. Each region would take turns being first.

Of course, none of this will be easy, what with the diffuse power structure governing this process: between the national political parties, the 50 state governments, and the feds, no one has enough power to tell the others what to do.

But something’s got to give, otherwise we’re going to have primaries that start the day after Inauguration Day.