Given the latest news, it is very hard to disagree with the former Speaker's
comments about presidential campaigning.
Potential presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich on Tuesday blasted the modern-day road to the White House as too long, too expensive and verging on "insane."
The former House speaker from Georgia said he will decide whether to enter the GOP presidential field in October. But in a wide-ranging speech at the National Press Club in Washington, he ridiculed campaign consultants and spin doctors who he said are extending the 2008 campaign. He said presidential debates have become "almost unendurable."
"These aren't debates," the former Georgia congressman said. "This is a cross between [TV shows] 'The Bachelor,' 'American Idol' and 'Who's Smarter than a Fifth-Grader.'"
Despite my general interest in politics, I too have found the debates painful to watch. I get more out of reading the transcript and have taken to doing that. The expense and the activity level are brutal and probably unnecessary. Gingrich, ever the idea man, offers a solution:
Gingrich's answer to the problems would be to get rid of limits on campaign financing, which he said have made the problems worse by requiring more individual donations to meet the same goals, and to stage a series of "dialogues" among the major-party candidates -- once a week, for 90 minutes, for nine weeks before the elections.
Candidates would pick the topics, and their answers would be uninterrupted "except for fairness on time," he said.
"After nine 90-minute conversations in their living rooms, the American people would have a remarkable sense of the two personalities and which person had the right ideas, the right character, the right capacity to be a leader," he said.
I love the campaign finance side of things, so long as there is reasonable disclosure. I also like the dialogues idea, but I wonder how it would work in a primary context, but I can see it in a general election context quite easily and like the idea a great deal.
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