GOP Clown Car Crashes In Virginia

Many times during this campaign the GOP race for the presidential nomination has resembled a clown car crash in the middle of a B-rated one-ring circus -- and that was never more so than this last week in Virginia. I'm starting to wonder if any of the Republican candidates are serious about getting the Republican nomination -- except, that is, for "Wall Street" Romney (who the party's base hates) and "Crazy old Coot" Paul (who scares even the right-wing nuts).

Thanks to a multi-candidate comedy of errors, the only candidates who will be on the March 6th Virginia primary ballot are Mitt Romney and Ron Paul. That means those two will be splitting up the Virginia delegates, and all the other candidates will be out in the cold.

To get on the Virginia ballot a candidate needed to get at least 10,000 voter signatures (with at least 400 signatures in each of the 11 congressional districts), and those signatures had to be submitted by 5pm last Thursday. Romney turned in 16,026 signatures on Tuesday, and Paul beat the deadline on Thursday with 14,361.

Perry and Gingrich also turned in signatures by the deadline -- with Perry submitting 11,911 and Gingrich submitting 11,050. But evidently either too many were not registered voters or they didn't meet the 400 level for every congressional district, because the state Republican Party said they had both failed to qualify for the ballot.

The Perry campaign hasn't said much, but Newt Gingrich blew a gasket. He called the Virginia requirement "a failed system" and said he would be working hard to get write-in votes. That was obviously just another example of him talking without knowing what he's talking about, because the rules prohibit any write-in votes in Virginia's primary.

But as ridiculous as the Perry and Gingrich campaigns look after this fiasco, there are four other Republican presidential campaigns that look even worse. The campaigns of Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman, and Buddy Roemer didn't even bother to submit any signatures at all. That's pretty pathetic. Out of a population of more than 8 million people, they couldn't even scrape up a paltry 10,000 signatures? How is anyone in that state (and elsewhere) supposed to take their candidacies seriously?

What a mess!

(The above picture is from Meme Center.)