With Iowa in the rearview mirror, New Hampshire dead ahead, and miles and miles of nominating contests to go, the Brookings Institution’s Elaine Kamarck has performed a valuable service by getting into the weeds, describing the mechanics of how America picks its presidential nominees, and explaining how we got here. Primary Politics leads the reader to conclude that process is policy.
Freddy Gray comments on Rubio’s bad performance Saturday in the eighth Republican presidential debate:
It was awkward. In total, he said the same line four times. He didn’t look like an election winner, to put it mildly. As the debate went on, Rubio regained his footing. He finished strongly with a passionate defence of his opposition to abortion. But by then it was too late. He had had his shocker. He had shown once again what a deeply flawed candidate he is. He may look polished, but he is not accomplished. He isn’t comfortable thinking on his feet.
Daniel DePetris said last week that Paul’s exit from the race would hurt the quality of the foreign policy debate in the primaries:
Deputy Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, Sergei Ryabkov, has said that Washington is preparing to launch a global military strike soon. The U.S. is deliberately destabilising relations with Russia, according to Ryabkov, by creating a global missile defense system, and continuing to develop tools capable of inflicting a disarming strike without using nuclear weapons .
Queen Elizabeth opposed a change to the British voting system which would have allowed “proportional representation” – a type of electoral system that decides the make-up of a parliament by allocating seats on the basis of the number of votes each party received. The Queen told Labour peer Joyce Gould, Baroness Gould of Potternewton, during a 20-minute conversation that she utterly opposed a change to the British voting system, even though the change would have made voting fairer and more representative of the British public’s needs.