from his remarks at the National Press Club on Tuesday (and I'm sure his interest in the subject of the candidacy process is informed by his own deliberation process, but on that point, he's not opining.)
[The current system] turns the candidates into rigidity. Because if a candidate says something in March of 2007 and, in the course of the campaign, they learn something fundamentally different and they mature and change, and in August or September or October, they adopt a new position based on having grown during the year, they will promptly have flip-flopped.
And so you begin to trap people. As the campaigns get longer, you're asking a person who's going to be sworn in, in January of 2009, to tell you what they'll do, in January of 2007, when they haven't got a clue. Because they don't know what the world will be like.
And you're suggesting they won't learn anything through the two years of campaigning.
It was John F. Kennedy, campaigning in West Virginia, being horrified by poverty, which profoundly changed him in 1960.
And so we now have a system that is overly focused on money, overly delegated to technicians, and in which candidates are held to a rigidity standard that is very dangerous, while their answers are held to a soundbite and 30-second standard, which is just, frankly absurd.
What's your answer on Iraq in 30 seconds?
What's your answer on health care in 30 seconds?
Now, I believe this is really, really serious.
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