Today was the last day that you could submit signatures to appear on the ballot in the Virginia primaries. It’s not an easy process. You need to collect 10,000 valid signatures, including at least 400 from each of Virginia’s eleven congressional districts. Rick Perry tried, but failed, to get 10,000. Newt Gingrich submitted over 11,000, but must now pray that enough of them are from actual voters to get him over the hump. Ron Paul and Mitt Romney had no trouble and were certified. Jon Huntsman, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and whoever else is pretending to run for president, didn’t even submit any signatures. In other words, in one of the swingiest of swing-states, we could see a ballot featuring only Romney and Paul. In any case, it will have no more than three candidates to choose from.
May I submit that you can’t seriously hope to be the leader of the free world if you can’t even get your crap together to get your name on the ballot? No one should take you seriously in Iowa if we know you’re not even going to be on the ballot in Virginia. This would be a good opportunity for the media to start ignoring everything Santorum, Perry, Bachmann, and Hunstman have to say.
Look at this comedy:
Jerry Kilgore, former attorney general and chairman of Perry’s campaign in Virginia, said in an interview Friday night he did not know how many signatures were submitted. He said he was disappointed, but that qualifying for the Virginia ballot is a “daunting task.”
“Hopefully, he will do better in other states,’’ he said. “He can focus on other states.”
Yes, candidates can focus on campaigning in states where they will actually appear on the ballot. That is very good advice.
We have a crazy electoral system. But you have to be able to master it to have any hope of mastering the federal government. Consider the fact that the Clintons screwed up their campaign by not understanding how delegates were allocated until it was too late. And they ran the government for eight years and basically created the process set up by their DNC. It’s not a simple thing to run a presidential campaign. It takes a lot of brain power. You’ve got Rick Perry failing to qualify for the ballot in Virginia and Mitt Romney operating with one office and three staffers in all of South Carolina. These people are amateurs, and they’ve going to get their heads handed to them.
