Primaries

A particularly interesting Fox News Sunday discussion on the Internet-only "Panel Plus" segment this morning:

The boss explained how his analysis of the 2012 presidential race differs with Karl Rove's take. (Rove recently outlined his analysis in the Wall Street Journal; the boss previously wrote that he sees the presidential race a little differently.)

When talking this morning about the impact of super PACs, the boss said, “I mean, it's a new part of this election cycle." He went to note that there are several new things about this cycle: "A different schedule in the primaries. The proportional allocation of the delegates in the Republican primaries until April 1. I’ve sort of been on the side of assuming things will be very different this year. Plus we had the Tea Party in 2010. Plus it seems like a new moment American politics—Barack Obama won in 2008. I may be wrong."

The boss continued: "Karl Rove has sort of hard-headedly said '. . . it's another presidential election and most of the rules of the game still hold. The guy who raises the most money, and has the best organized campaign, and wins the first couple states--guess what? He's probably going to win.' And Karl may be right. This may be much more like a traditional Republican primary election than I have assumed. And I think it's an interesting question. I've sort of assumed, as I've said, that a new environment plus these new rules will change things--we'll see if it does over the next few weeks."