The limited list of candidates that are *allowed* to run with party backing are predetermined by the leadership.
You know this based on..? You've seen the list? You sat in a leadership meeting once...? Did you see who was on the list in 2011?
He gave an excellent example.
Get over it. He’s right.
This is no great secret, and has been done for decades.
Originally it was half legitimate, that the party leadership decided to only give support to candidates that they felt were competitive, often who had already secured the backing of the big name donors to the party.
This came to a head even before the primary season had begun with W. Bush before his first term, who had so monopolized the big contributors that all challengers, especially John McCain, were locked out of the process. For his part, McCain was livid about it.
However the Tea Party has clarified a new angle to this, by pointing out that the leadership are all “big tent” Republicans, who were automatically cutting out conservative candidates on the assumption that they could not win, so should not be given a chance to try, as it would just waste party resources.
And while to conservatives, the leaderships’ disastrous choices of Dole, McCain and Romney showed that liberal Republicans couldn’t win; it just reinforced the leaderships’ belief that it proved “since liberals (moderates) can’t win then conservatives have no chance.”
That is their assumption that even their liberal choices weren’t “big tent” liberal enough. In all fairness, the leadership did not reach this conclusion on their own, it is a major belief of the Republican beltway bandits, like Karl Rove, who increasingly reject conservatism and are rejected by conservatives.