Redstate

I highly disagree.  Senator Kerry is a man convinced of the necessity that he be President.  And you really can't dissuade a man who believes his own hype or mythos (he's the second coming of JFK).  He'll be running whether he's at 50% or 15% or 2% of  Democratic primary voters.

...I think that they should have every primary on the same day.  Both parties.

Yes, I'm sure that there are no doubt a hundred good reasons why this is a truly bad idea.  I still want it to happen, just to see the glorious rampaging chaos and public nervous breakdowns of various politicians and pundits.  :)

wants to keep the primary important in NH?  Anyone help me out here?

Perhaps it's nostalgia.  A sense of tradition, one supposes.

Oh, but of course, now I see: it's his sense of integrity, and his faith in the electoral process.

Only a cynic would strain common sense to suggest some demographic similarity between New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and to put that forward as a possible motivation.  

the "party disunity" that would come out of that? In 2004 for the Democrats, Dean might have won by a slim margin before the MSM "informed them" that he was damaged goods.

Selecting a candidate at the convention had its drawbacks, but it usually gave the country someone who had the best chance of winning the election, which meant someone more representative of the general populace.  

The primary system tests how well each candidate can appeal to the dedicated base of each party, which usually means that more extreme candidates are chosen.  (Thus, the Dems have ended up with Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry.)

That's the entire point of the exercise: get the parties back into having knock-down, drag-out fights at their conventions.  We haven't had any of those in going on two generations, now - and I'd say that the country's suffered for it.  Certainly both parties have.

on Terry McAuliffe's part to force an early front-runner, which gave us Kerry as the likely nominee before the others could really debate for us very much.

I hope the GOP doesn't make similar mistakes in 2008.

With pretty similar rules, we've nominated Ford, Reagan, George H. Bush, Dole, and George W. Bush. Not exactly a bunch of idealogues, no matter what the lefties would like to think. Of course, neither were candidates Carter and Clinton (Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry, on the other hand...).

Primaries require getting a majority of the primary voters, which pushes the candidates to the center of the party (which is why we Republicans almost alway nominate center-right establishment types). But primary voters do want to win in the general election, so if a guy who says what the activists want to hear is percieved as unelectable, he's going down.

And, well, I think the competing pressures of the primary (run to the right/left) and the general (run to the center) are a Good Thing. They tend to insure there's a meaningful difference between the candidates, and to keep the worst extremes of the major parties from getting anywhere on the national level -- as bad as Gore and Kerry were, there was far worse in the wings.

had much of a serious debate among presidential contenders since perhaps 1976.  The presidential candidate has almost always been known in advance of the primary campaign, or just after the primary campaign's beginning.

Those who care enough to vote in the primaries are the most zealous of the party, and hence the most extreme.   To win a primary, you need to be the candidate most in line with their views.  Your ability to win is secondary (although you must have some ability to win, hence the demise of Keyes in 2000).

Why Republicans have been able to nominate more moderate candidates, even with the primary system, while the Democrats have not, is an interesting question, though.

Care to offer up some proof that nominees have been of a lower quality (or some other standard) in the modern era due to a lack of a convention fight?  While it certainly would be more dramatic for their to be convention fights for the nomination, it would also be seen as amateurish and as if the party doesn't have its' act together.

I personally think that it takes more (and thus makes a better candidate) to appeal to the masses across fifty seperate primaries and caucus than it does a few thousand dyed-in-the-wool party delegates.

If the Democrats would have had their party delegates decide the nominee in 2004 there is no doubt they would have chosen Howard Dean.  He was certainly more extreme than John Kerry was.  Your idea that delegates (the hardcore of the hardcore, typically) at the conventions would somehow be less extreme than the individuals that vote in the primaries seems a tad... unlikely.

Nor would Kerry have made it

But speculation on what would have happened in this last election is not the point.  The fact is the the Dems chose yet another extreme candidate who had little chance of winning and who wasn't representative of the middle of the country (just like McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, etc.).

The point is that when you compare the candidates chosen through the primary system with the candidates chosen through the convention system earlier in the century, you find that the latter are more representative of the party as a whole and thus less extreme.  Examples are Humphrey rather than McCarthy, Truman rather than Thurmond, Eisenhower over Taft, and Dewey over Taft.  (Goldwater was an exception, I admit.)

McGovern.

Carter.

Mondale.

Dukakis.

George HFW Bush.

Gore.

Kerry.

It's been somewhere around forty years since the last contested convention fight, and we've had four competent presidential candiates since then; Nixon, Reagan, Clinton and George W Bush (Clinton's there solely because of sheer raw political talent; the current scheme rewards candidates like him).  Dole would be on the above list of bad candidates, except that I liked his post-election style too much; GHFWB is on the list because, really, without Reagan he was so much raw meat.

But if you guys want us to keep nominating and electing centrists, OK.  Shoot, I'm a centrist/neocon/RiNO/what have you; I'd rather our candidates win because people agree that we're right, but if you want us to keep gaming the system, well, we can do that too.  :)

I know it's conventional wisdom that primary voters are more extreme than general election voters, but are they really? Or is it just that independents generally can't vote in primaries?

All I'm saying is that primaries tend to pick people pretty close to the center of their party, not that they pick people close to the center of the country. It's my hypothesis that the Democrats are consistently running into trouble at the national level because there's more diversion between the center of the Democrats and the center of the country than there is between the center of the Republicans and the center of the country.