NPR does one right

As I was driving to Apple this morning for a meeting I listened (uncharacteristically I might add) to NPR and Linda Wertheimer talk about the Democrat's nominations process. It was a very good piece. Wertheimer explained that the party, starting in 1972, decided to try to involve more "people" in their process. She argued that Obama understood the game in this election this year better than his opponents because he understood that the way that the process is structured that the loser in big states actually wins. In smaller states, the benefits of winning are heightened. Wertheimer then argued that Obama created a strategy which recognized that and then instead of Clinton's approach (concentrate on the big states) he pursued a lot of individual races in congressional districts and a lot of the caucus states. Note: Roger SImon at Politico had a similar conclusion in a long piece (this is part 2) on how Obama won the nomination.

There is one problem with that which may come back to bite him however. The participants in the democratic primaries are not the general electorate. So his focus and base is left of where the electorate is in most elections. Whether this hurts Obama in this election remains to be seen. But it is a long term problem for those who would like to elect presidents from the Democrat party. Wertheimer's report pointed out the obvious tradeoffs of involving too many people on one side of the political spectrum.