I should probably be ashamed to admit this but my favorite part of any presidential election season is the Republican primaries, especially the debates. Since Republicans rarely have an incumbent president running (they have only had three Republican presidents in the last 35 years) the primaries are usually a free-for-all that features some very eccentric fringe characters as well as the precipitous fall of at least one highly touted conservative hero who everyone in the political establishment assumed was a shoo-in just months before.
I think back to 1992 which featured what we all thought was a completely beyond-the-pale Pat Buchanan speech at the RNC that the late great Molly Ivins famously quipped "sounded better in the original German."(That speech now sounds like virtually every GOP candidate running for any office.) In 2008 the open primary offered up the excitement of yet another Hollywood actor-turned-Republican politician in Fred Thompson, then a senator from Tennessee, who had the entire political press corps in a swoon, convinced that he was the next Ronald Reagan. Like so many others, Thomas quickly flamed out on the trail, showing himself to be a bad retail candidate once he had to mingle with the polloi in Iowa and New Hampshire.
