This email from a reader named Dennis is in response to my column last week on the presidential nominating process. I thought it was worth sharing, as it gets to the heart of the issue as well as anything I have seen:

Presidential primaries have one purpose: to nominate a presidential candidate who can win the general election. So a concession that the primary process is "broken" requires an admission that what it produces is unacceptable, i.e., the nominee.

An analogy: let us say that GM admits that its process for producing Cadillacs needs to be overhauled. Logically that can only mean one thing: the top brass is not happy with the end product. For if Cadillacs were selling well, no one would question the manner in which they are being made. If I am a Democrat or Republican, my dissatisfaction with the primary system must be tethered to my dissatisfaction with the candidate. Any other position is really sophistry.

So the real question to those who do not like the current system is "has your party ever nominated a candidate for president who was undeserving of the honor because of some defect in the nominating process?" Or, "name one election since 1972 where you believe a fairer or different nominating process would have yielded a different nominee was more qualified to lead your party?" I would understand Sabato's argument a lot better if he said that the system needs to be changed because quality candidates are not running who could have a better chance of winning. But that is not the argument.

This is a great way of framing the issue. The goal of the nominating process is to select a nominee. Accordingly, any argument about reforming the system should implicitly argue that prior nominees were inferior because of the nominating process. A viable form of this argument may be possible. It may not be. Either way, I have seen no attempts at it.

Instead, those who advocate reform make far too much use of generalities - not just metaphors, but also recourse to vague voting rights rhetoric that is historically anachronistic and logically contentious. Historically, this "right" only really came into existence about thirty years ago. Logically, can we really argue with such finality that the right to vote in a presidential primary is indeed a right? Reformers like to treat it as such. Their arguments implicitly assume that citizens have the right to determine who party nominees are. How else can objections based upon "representativeness" carry such sway but for the premise that the "people" have a right to choose the party nominees. Personally, I think no such right exists - and I think we should have that argument before we argue how to provide this so-called right to the public.

My personal feeling is that the party possesses the right to select its nominees. And the party consists not of the people who twenty odd years ago checked "R" or "D" on their voter registration (or who, out of curiosity, wandered over to the red booth instead of the blue booth because John McCain was more intriguing than Al Gore) - but those with an actual stake in the party. These are party leaders, party workers, party officials in government, etc. If those stakeholders prefer to open the process up to the broader partisan base (which they do), that is their prerogative. But simply because they have chosen to do this does not mean that they have ceded to the broader public their right to manage their own process.

This leads to another consideration. Maybe the way to fix the system is to enable the DNC and RNC to bring order to it. After all, they are the entities with the greatest interest in a maximally efficient primary process. If we are interested in reforming and rationalizing the nominating process, perhaps we should - dare I say it? - empower the parties? I know it is a heretical thought. After all, partisan politics is the root of all evil, and the course of governmental "reform" in the last 40 or so years has been geared toward disempowering the parties. But look where that got us. Maybe we should give them a little more leverage over their nomination processes, rather than taking all of it from them.