Chairman Reince Priebus leads party establishment to alteration of Republican Primary debate rules

Democracy, elections and voting at Democracy Chronicles

EDITORIAL: Republican establishment rigs rules to get its candidate for president

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The Republican establishment, which gets so many things wrong, is trying to manipulate the party rules to make sure it gets the presidential candidate it wants in 2016. The party chiefs put it another way, of course: They’re just trying to make sure that the party nominates a “respectable” candidate who won’t be mortally wounded before it’s time to fight Democrats. Some of what Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, wants to put into place makes sense, but many of the suggestions from other quarters don’t.

In the run-up to the nomination four years ago, Republican candidates trooped across the country to appear at so many “debates” that the candidates, having missed the last streetcar home from the vaudeville circuit, resembled third-rate entertainers at the county fair. They all looked foolish, peddling stale one-liners and trying to one-up one another, and soon the only audiences were half-full houses of bored junkies.

Mr. Priebus has been working to reduce the number of such debates and to reform those left, and to eliminate “moderators” trying to force the candidates to talk about the issues they learned at politically correct moderator school, and little about what voters were really interested in. The chairman’s reforms would enable the candidates to talk about what they want to talk about, and that makes sense, too.

What doesn’t make sense is rigging the system to cook the primaries to get the result the establishment wants. A number of the contributors with gilt-edged checkbooks, who yearn for a rerun of the Romney campaign or who think that America is crying for a third President Bush, want to find a way to silence pesky primary and caucus voters who have wishes and wants of their own.