With this huge field of candidates, the seemingly impossible goal of our unmanaged processes should have been to encourage the quality candidates while discouraging the embarrassing candidates. As intensely proud as I am of the performance of the seven candidates in Saturday's debate, I'm even prouder of our convention delegates for having the collective distributed wisdom to put exactly those seven before the C-SPAN cameras. At first I questioned their judgment at letting Smith have time for nominating speeches, but now I see the genius in denying her an excuse for her dismal vote total (6 out of ~650 delegates) while creating an object lesson for anyone who might be tempted to emulate her race in the future.
Tom Knapp has been talking almost perfect sense since the closing gavel, but his post-gavel defense of Smith is as off-base as his pre-gavel predictions about the strength of Root's candidacy. :-)
Brian, if you could provide some cites for the claims in your first sentence about Smith's past positions on health care and taxes, I'd like to be able to incorporate (with credit) some of the information in your comment into any future TPW article that might have occasion to mention Smith's quitting.
