There has been much hand-wringing about the upcoming first-of-season, presidential primary debate. FoxNews, as host, has set the rules that limit the debate to those top 10 candidates in an average of the last five national polls.
It left a few candidates who were polling in the 2% and 3% range not knowing until two days before the debate whether they would be in. There was much lobbying, frantic marketing and tv ads, and outrageous, headline grabbing statements -- all aimed at getting their names in the news before those last five polls.
In the end, Chris Christie and John Kasich got those coveted #9 and #10 spots, leaving Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorino, George Pataki, Lindsey Graham, and Jim Gilmore to a sort of "losers' compensation" debate in at 5:00 pm on Thursday, before the 9:00 pm debate that night.
Pundits and campaigns have expressed concern that FoxNews and its powerful news chief Roger Ailes thus had the power to "pick the nominee" -- and that the method was unfair, given that the slim margin separating #9 and #10 from #11 and #12 were within the margin of error in polls.
Of course, it matters terribly for those few candidates in that critical range. But consider this: How much does it really matter in the long run, as to who eventually gets the nomination?
Does anyone really think that Rick Perry, now at 2% -- or Bobby Jindal at 1.2% -- could make such an impression on the debate stage that he would leap-frog over the ten or twelve men ahead of him into the top spot?
It really is a game with only one winner. And, in a field this big -- with front-runners being financed by their own billionaires -- the winner is not going to emerge, cinderella-like, from the underfunded also-rans in 11th or 12th place. Sorry, Perry; you've improved since 2012, just not enough.
Ralph
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