(World Wildlife Federation)
The Republican plan,
writes Benjy Sarlin, was to emulate the Clinton/Obama contest of 2008 by rearranging the primaries to draw them out, which they thought would encourage more donations, build enthusiasm among voters and keep attention focused on the GOP message.
It might have worked, too. If only they had had a couple of solid candidates of the caliber of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton instead of a clown car brimful of clueless, gaffe-prone, dog-whistling, foghorn-blowing, take-us-back-to-the-14th Century ideological hard-heads with an even bigger than usual bucket of It's-OK-If-You-Are-Republican attitudes and a never-ending forgetfulness of the power of YouTube to spread what they'd previously said on camera a few years or a few days ago that was opposite to what they were saying now.
But they didn't.
(Continue reading under the fold)
So, as an interminable series of debates unfolded, one candidate after another gained front-runner status, collected more media attention and had his or her past and ideas exposed, the voters said ugh! and quickly shifted to the next candidate du jour. The plummet for each was steeper than the rise. Rinse and repeat. Week after week. One would expect at the very least the drawn-out calendar would bring large numbers of voters to the polls. In fact, turnout has been lower than 2008 in most states.
“You’re running against an incumbent president who will not have a primary, so your idea is make ours longer so we can beat each other up longer?” New Jersey governor Chris Christie (R) complained to FOX News last week, calling the new rules “the dumbest idea anyone ever had.”
The key problem, according to some GOP critics, including Republican National Committeeman John Ryder, is the primary schedule itself. Penalties put into place to keep states from moving their primaries or caucuses to earlier dates didn't work. That might not have mattered if there had been a big contest in which one candidate or another could have ended things with a decisive victory. Or if Super Tuesday could have accomplished the same thing by being held in early February as it was in 2008.
“Generals always fight the last war,” University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato told TPM, faulting Republicans for failing to recognize that running against a powerful incumbent president is very different than 2008’s open primaries. “If ever there was a case when the out-of-power party would have been helped by a quick, painless nomination of a strong challenger, it’s 2012. No such luck for the GOP. The long hard-edged campaign will leave Republicans divided, unhappy, and missing many millions they otherwise would have had at their disposal for the fall.”
But, ultimately, it's not the scheduling that has put the GOP in a bind. It's the party's dreadful candidates. The majority of Republicans still want somebody else. When you can't convince the members of your own side, persuading independents and fence-straddlers in the other party is a very, very big problem.