By Ghost of John Brown -
I know, you're devastated. Shocked. You probably need to call in and take the day off work.
What's that? You have no idea who Buddy Roemer is and you could care less? OK, nevermind.
This election cycle, like most, there are a host of characters that run for office for reasons that really have nothing to do with wanting to become President. Did you realize that we've actually had at least 19 candidates just on the Republican side this cycle? That doesn't even include the people that were "strongly considering" a run for the White House like Daniels, Barbour, Palin, etc. There were at least 10 of them.
People get into the Presidential race for a variety of reasons. Take Newt Gingrich for example. When Newt got into the race (early May 2011), his national favorability ratings were about 53% unfavorable and only around 28% favorable. Newt is a smart guy. There is no way that he really thought that he had a shot. My guess is that he got into the race to boost his stature and sell more books. Curiously, in the middle of the race another quixotic candidate, Herman Cain, also went on a book tour. Now, he is doing the speaker's circuit.
Buddy Roemer was never a serious candidate. He eschewed major funding and held to a $100 maximum contribution. I know everyone hates to talk about money in politics, but until we get a different system, if you have no dough, you ain't gonna go. Do we need a system that takes out the influence of money? Sure, but we have been talking about that for decades, passed a number of laws about it and it has only gotten worse. In Roemer's case, he envisioned a system where the rules were different. The only trouble is that the rules hadn't changed yet. It would be like an NBA player in the early 1970's expecting to get 3 points for a 25' jumper. The 3-point shot didn't get adopted in the NBA untl the 1979-80 season. You don't play by rules that haven't been adopted.
We've needed to have a serious campaign season, and this campaign cycle has been anything but serious. It started with the premise that many people believed we could run a dog-catcher against Obama and win so it really didn't matter who our candidate was. Well, now with his polls rising and the economy creeping back a little bit, people are starting to see that's just not going to be the case. The trouble is that we have our very narrow field of candidates already set and at least 2 of them came from that set of candidates that weren't serious to begin with (I'll let you figure out which two out of the four remaining candidates those are. It might even be three of them).
Sadly, now Buddy Roemer is not a part of it. Buddy, we never knew ya..........Literally.
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