Whats the motivation for extending the US presidential campaign process?
It’s just an attempt by some states to gain some additional leverage by being the first in the primary. It gets pretty silly because what, in effect, we have is that the entire year before the election, 10 months before the election, is now taken up by campaigns before the actual primaries and the whole year before that as well. So we now have a two year campaign period; whereas European countries have a three or four week campaign period because they have a much saner system. The parties have identifiable positions, they have proportional representation, and the use of money is very seriously limited. That’s the way to really get money out of the campaign not by repressive measures for bidding or spending limits, because they continually find loopholes of one sort or another but by removing the need for so much money. And the direction we’re going in is just increasing the need. Remember, we have three primaries in this country. We have the voting primary. We have the money primary, i
