Nomination without representation

With the start of the New Year the 2012 Republican presidential primary kicked itself into high gear. The Iowa caucuses are now just a memory and the votes in the New Hampshire primary are being counted as I write this. Soon the South Carolina primary will be held and at that point some pundits think the race could be all but decided.

But even if it isn’t, the field of challengers will be certainly be narrowed down by the time the people of the Palmetto state have their say. Michele Bachmann is already gone after her poor showing in Iowa and Rick Perry is hanging on by a thread. Those of us who vote later in the primaries (i.e. the vast majority of the American public) may have little or no say in who the Republicans draft to run against Barak Obama.

And that irritates me more than I can say. Is it any wonder that we feel disconnected from our government when the major parties nominate candidates for the highest office using a process that relies so disproportionately on the views of a tiny minority of eligible voters? It’s a silly process that generally produces silly candidates, and we’re lucky that people still bother to vote at all.

Still, I try to care. I recently took one of those online quizzes that asks you a series of questions and suggests which candidates most closely align to your views, theoretically helping you decide who to vote for. Unsurprisingly the libertarian-leaning Ron Paul came in first for me as an 80% match, followed by Mitt Romney at 63% and Newt Gingrich at 57%.

Scoring much lower as my potential political soul-mate was right wing flavor-of-the-week Rick Santorum. That too came as little surprise. The difference between Ron Paul and Rick Santorum comes down to a belief in limited government. Ron Paul believes in limited government, period. Rick Santorum believes in limited government too, except for when he doesn’t.

Let’s take abortion, for example, one of the two take-no-prisoners issues that social conservatives are willing to fall on their sword over (the other one being gay marriage, of course). Ron Paul is personally opposed to abortion on moral grounds, but he does not believe that the US Constitution gives the power on the federal government the authority to legislate the issue one way or the other. Rick Santorum reads the Constitution differently in this case, and believes that there should be a federal law outlawing abortion in all circumstances.

And when I say all circumstances, I mean all circumstances. He believes that victims of rape and incest should be legally required by the federal government to carry their babies to term. The same thing would apply if, say, a doctor told a prospective mother that her baby was seriously deformed and unlikely to survive after being born or that it might kill her if she did not terminate the pregnancy. She would see the pregnancy through or both she and her doctor would be subject to criminal prosecution.

That kind of thinking goes over well with one vocal segment of the Republican Party, but the majority of Americans would be put off by that level of interference by the government in a citizen’s personal life. Abortion is troubling to many of us on moral grounds and we’d likely support some legal restrictions on it, but circumstances matter. The rights of the unborn child have to be balanced against the right of a woman to make her own medical decisions without the interference of the federal government.

But I suppose I may be wasting my time contrasting the potential merits of a Ron Paul or Rick Santorum nomination. By the time I get a chance to vote, one or both of these men could be gone, or one of them could have the nomination sewn up. There’s no sense wasting my few functioning brains cells on a decision the good folks in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina may be good enough to make for me.