Saturday, February 21, 2009

California's Open Primaries Will Reduce Freedom

Doing some reading on primaries, I found the following in an article about the proposed open primary system for California:

The existing primary system, Nehring said, was another Progressive-era reform that shifted the power of nominating candidates from conventions and caucuses to all party members.

Then I saw this on Wikipedia:

In the 1952 presidential election, Kefauver decided to offer himself as a candidate for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Campaigning in his coonskin cap, often by dogsled, Kefauver made history when, in an electrifying victory in the New Hampshire primary, he defeated President Harry S. Truman, the sitting President of the United States. Although Kefauver would go on to win twelve of the fifteen primaries that were held that year, losing three to "favorite son" candidates, primaries were not, at that time, the main method of delegate selection for the national convention. Kefauver, therefore, entered the convention a few hundred votes shy of the needed majority. In the 1952 Democratic Party presidential primaries, Kefauver received 3.1 million votes, while the eventual 1952 Democratic presidential nominee, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, received only 78,000 votes.

A political party is a private sector entity. The party membership should be able to nominate their candidate in whatever manner they choose. It looks like that's just another freedom the "progressives" have stolen from me. Now the process is owned by the collective and manipulated by the political class. The proposed open primary system for California will make that worse. Progress!

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