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Guys, we now have a real problem on our hands. This is dead serious, and while people who are advocating votes for Ron Paul to embarrass Mitt Romney may have a good political point, it may be impossible to get some people (myself included) to vote for a candidate who favors gutting national defense — the primary reason for the existence of government!

We have 50 different sets of state rules for a reason — under a capitalist or a federalist system, different companies and different states are free to make their own choices so they can see what works best for them. I have no problem with Virginia's rules; they're designed to winnow out people who can't meet certain minimal standards of organizational ability. Other states have dozens of candidates on the ballot, and that's fine, too.

States can set their own rules and that's not a bad thing. Iowa and New Hampshire are designed to test grassroots support and door-to-door campaigning ability, basically forcing presidential candidates to campaign as if they were running for mayor or city council or county commissioner. That's not a bad thing because it allows underdogs to rise to the top and defeat candidates with tons of money who lack grassroots support. Other states have rules designed to reward those with major amounts of funding to buy television ads and mount aggressive statewide campaigns.

The problem here is not that Romney got people thrown off the ballot — even if he did, all that means is one candidate followed the rules and made sure everybody else did, too. The problem here is we've just had proven to us that neither the current governor of our largest Republican state nor the former Speaker of the House have sufficient organizational ability to get on the ballot of a major state like Virginia. That says bad things about Gingrich who wasn’t being taken seriously until recently, but it says especially bad things about Perry who has been a serious candidate for months now and should have gotten this handled long ago.

Furthermore, the “tea party movement” is supposed to be full of angry and highly motivated people. Gathering 10,000 signatures with a stated minimum from each congressional district would not have been a problem if the conservative base were fired up for a candidate. This shows not only that neither Gingrich nor Perry were sufficiently organized but also that neither candidate had strongly committed tea party supporters pulling out all the stops to work for them.

How in the blue blazes of heaven did we get into this situation? We have a fantastic chance to defeat President Barack Obama and we are throwing it out the window.