'Ticket' readers meet online for first live chat

Don Frederick and I had the first of what we expect to become an ongoing regular series of live online chats with Top of the Ticket readers today. We had some good exchanges during the hour. You can read the whole thing here. Though we did hav soem problems wiht typnig fast.

One of the most interesting items is whether the crammed primary/caucus schedule, as more states move their voting into early 2008, is good for the country. Don felt that the new primary schedule was terrible and that our presidential selection process had become the longest in the world. He was on a 6 a.m. flight out of New Hampshire this morning along with much of the Clinton team and they looked exhausted, he said in an ensuing blog item.

I thought the preprimary schedule had become too long. I noted that Bill Clinton announced his campaign in October of 1991, 13 months before the general election. By 1999, George W. Bush was announcing in early summer, and in 2007 many announcements came in January-February, 22 months before the general.

I noted how the actual primary voting process has been compacted into basically six weeks, too short a time for the actual local issue-learning process by candidates and too short for the voters in most states to see and hear the candidates up close, as they do in Iowa and New Hampshire.

And Don worried that the elongated selection process created foreign problems for the U.S. as countries around the world must study several shadow governments jockeying for position and power for far longer now, in effect for the second half of each term. "That can't help but undercut what the existing (U.S.) government is up to," Don said.

We'll be scheduling future live online chats in the coming weeks on various topics. Watch this space for more details.

-- Andrew Malcolm