Huffington Magazine Issue 80 | Page 10

Enter can’t this just take a couple of months? This is America! — and it’s high time we killed the whole thing with fire. Well, the precious footfalls of baby steps are at least pattering in the distance. CNN’s Peter Hamby reports that “handpicked members of the Republican National Committee,” who have met in “a series of closed-door meetings since August,” have proposed a “sweeping plan” to lessen the obvious awfulness of the GOP primary process, in the hopes that maybe the 2016 election won’t be so excruciating for their nominee. And that is the primary driver of these reforms. According to Hamby, lingering memories of the GOP primary debates, in which Mitt Romney had to “stake out a number of conservative positions that came back to haunt him in the general election,” loom large in the party’s motivation. Go read the whole thing, but here are the back-of-the-cerealbox details. ORDER WILL BE RESTORED TO THE PRIMARY CALENDAR: One thing that we all worry about ahead of any presidential primary process is whether this will be LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST HUFFINGTON 12.22.13 the election cycle in which interloping states — hoping to grab some of the cachet of traditionally early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire, in a rabid game of brinksmanship — finally push things so far back on the calendar that the 2016 nominating process gets rolling around Halloween 2015. This time around, the RNC plans to dole out heavy [