The National Post
Primary process works in the U.S., but a bad fit for Canada
By Andrew Coyne
The Iowa caucuses may have an indifferent record of predicting who will go on to become a party’s nominee for president, but they have a pretty good record of predicting who won’t. Since 1976, no candidate has won the nomination of either party who finished worse than third in Iowa. So: better luck next time, Newt Gingrich. Goodbye, Rick Perry. Thank you, Michele Bachmann. You have delighted us long enough.
That’s not a message that all of them are quite yet ready to hear. Though Bachmann has dropped out, Perry will apparently make a goal-line stand in South Carolina. As for Gingrich, he seems prepared to devote whatever is left of his campaign to destroying Mitt Romney’s. Bizarrely, he insists he will do this without going negative. (“You can do that pretty happily. You can have happy music.”) His glowering, truculent post-Iowa speech captured the contradictions in his mood: to hell with everybody, and let’s win there.
The Republican race has attracted a good deal of criticism, both for the quality of the candidates — this is without a doubt the weakest GOP field in living memory — and for the seeming fickleness of the party’s conservative base, who have shifted their support from one candidate to another in search of someone who can defeat the front-running Romney. Personally, I think it speaks well of the voters that they have been unwilling to settle for Romney, a man of undoubted accomplishment but soul-destroying vacuity on the stump. And it speaks well of the American system that it gives them so much time to shop around.
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/01/04/andrew-coyne-primaries-work-in-iowa-but-a-bad-fit-for-canada/
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