Recently, old-line Republican mainstream commentator George Will acknowledged the elephant in the room:
Herman Cain had no intention of being nominated for President. He did not do the state-by-state organizational work that candidates do, he did not have any strategy for dealing with his checkered personal history, and his performance on foreign policy questions was literally to stare in silence at the ceiling and repeat the word “Libya,” then ask the reporter what Obama’s policy was so he could disagree with it.
Herman Cain used the nomination process to generate publicity for himself and raise his profile within the conservative world, so that he can cash in by writing a book and going on a speaking tour in the future. He knew his campaign would ultimately crash and he didn’t care, because the last thing he wanted was to be stuck for four years making only the President’s annual $400,000 salary. Newt Gingrich makes more than that in a month of compensated speeches.
Michelle Bachmann likewise is not actually trying to become President. She has essentially no state organizations either. Donald Trump, the less said the better.
Should the Republicans take steps to exclude candidates who are not actually candidates from their process? Would this be good for the country in producing better nominees more quickly? Should non-Republicans care or just be gleeful that the party is being exposed for currently being the sort of circus sideshow that defined the Democrats in the 1970s?
The debates are mostly set up by independent agencies. How are “Republicans” supposed to decide who CNN or NBC or even FOX allows to be in the debates?
As for the primaries, we already have an entrenched, two-party system that strangles outsiders. I can’t see that giving the establishment veto power over who gets to be a candidate would be a good thing. Freedom of speech is a bitch, because it means people you disagree with, even if it’s just their motive you disagree with, don’t have to STFU.
But one wonders, is the OP only concerned with “fake” GOP candidates?
Perhaps the OP was just going off on the article that Mr. Will wrote? I don’t believe either the article or this expansion on it are about shutting up those who you disagree with, but more about waylaying those who have no real intention of getting elected, but are using the electoral process to sell books and such.
I think Bachmann was making an honest go of it. She has little organization because her funding has dried up since she dropped in the polls. But her strategy was pretty much just to focus on Iowa anyways, I don’t think that makes her a “fake candidate” in the sense of Trumph or Cain.
In anycase, I don’t see a method of determining ‘fake’ candidates that wouldn’t just block poorly funded candidates or candidates unpopular with party leaders.
Their groud game wasn’t developed because their funding wasn’t developed. What sort of ground game do you think Obama had in Virginia before he won Iowa? Some grassroots stuff but the organized Democratic organizations were all working on strategies to deliver Virginia to Hillary. Then Obama won in Iowa and things got really interesting.
Some years you have too many good candidates (you sort of wish you could space them out more evenly) and other years you get a bunch of clowns. Hopefully democracy works to weed out the clowns without any sort of intervention from the parties.
I agree. the Republican party is going through a umm transition. Hopefully they will still be a viable party after they are through with their experiment.
I’m trying to find details, but you already have to do things like file with the FEC and gather signatures to get your name on the ballot. So there is already a process intended to show that candidates are serious and have some support, although I’m sure it could be tweaked. The debates are not run by the parties and they have their own rules in terms of who gets in (mostly based on poll numbers).
It’s true that Cain didn’t have much fundraising until maybe October, and then he had little time to capitalize on that money before he crapped out. But this is an incomplete explanation: he also spent very little time on the early primary/caucus states and his campaign schedule was kind of inexplicable- at least if you think he was trying to win. He took a break for his book tour and never spent much time in Iowa or New Hampshire. He kept going to other states instead. So he had the money to go to those states, whatever that cost. It’s also true that he had almost no staff at all, and that’s not really a money issue, it’s an experience issue. The entire campaign seemed to be run by Cain and maybe two other people, which left them with a shortage of good advice and no experience. A lot of people kept saying that Cain just wanted to sell books or get a Fox gig (including me) and I think that’s true - in the last month or so he probably took it seriously when the Tea Party briefly moved in his direction, but by then it was too late and the scandals and screwups came so fast it was like they were racing to be the one that sunk him.
Cain is not exactly the first guy to run a vanity campaign for president. He just became, for a very short time, one of the rare vanity candidates who gets some serious consideration from voters. Then he became another reason that vanity candidates don’t get taken seriously. Bachmann is something else: she’s a fringe candidate. So is Santorum, for example. She’s not a joke in the sense of having no intent to win, she just doesn’t have a chance to do it.
We know that the free market is the ultimate arbiter for all things. I think the Republicans should keep Romney and his ilk out of the debates. All he does is dilute the message of the other candidates and hurt book sales. Then, next summer, whoever has sold the most copies, wins the nomination.
Imagine the convention. “Mr. Speaker, from the executive offices in Seattle, to our state-of-the-art server farm, the great and sovereign company of Amazon-dot-com pledges 250,000 copies to Michele Bachmann!” Balloons drop, cue the music, etc.
I’m not sure how you can figure out which candidates are fakes besides letting time and publicity out them. At that point, they’ve already participated quite a bit.
How obvious was it to anyone that Herman Cain wasn’t serious at the beginning? Ok, yes, there was the Pokemon speech, but you could reasonably chalk that up to a renegade/plagiarist speechwriter. He knew the allegations of sexual impropriety would come up, but other people didn’t know that until they actually did. He knew that he had no foreign policy knowledge to speak of, but so did Sarah Palin, and she was actually chosen as a VP candidate by
Personally, I think Bachmann is a complete joke and actual crazy person. But she manages to be popular enough to repeatedly win House elections, so obviously I’m not in touch with her constituency. I can’t really come up with an objective set of criteria that would identify a thrice-elected congresswoman as a “fake” candidate.