I was reading an AP story about Nancy Pelosi's remarks about lowering the amount of superdelegates in the future. I'm glad this crazy process has brought us to the point where we are thinking about the best way to choose a nominee.
I agree with Speaker Pelosi on the basic premise of lowering the amount of superdelegates. But honestly they aren't the biggest problem. The amount of time and money wasted on this ridiculous election season cannot even be put into numbers.
There was no order, it was choas.
People got involved like they never had before across the entire nation. And that showed how crazy the system was. It may be archaic, but compared to most countries this is a very "democratic" way to nominate someone. Hell, try to tell a Brit that he gets to nominate the prime minister through a lengthy caucus/primary/Texas-Two-Step process of nominating delegates.
So we need to think of a better way to organize the times we do our elections in the Democratic Party. The Republicans are already way ahead of us:
The Republican Party is moving to regain control of its presidential primary calendar four years from now. A party rules committee voted last week to allow small states to hold nominating contests before big states in 2012, which would preserve the traditional roles of Iowa and New Hampshire as the earliest voting states. Larger states would be placed into three groups that would rotate the dates of their nominating contests.
That was from the same Pelosi article Laurie Kellman.
Is it just me or is that a great idea? A National Primary is impossible. I have worked on campaigns and have seen first hand why a national primary would not work well. If we did that, Hillary probably would already have been the nominee. You need time to organize and raise public awareness. That wouldn't be possible on a national scale except for someone with previous name recognition.
So is letting the small states go first, picking their candidate but not overwhelmingly giving delegates to one candidate or the other the best way to do this?