Why I'm not touching the primaries

Yes, the gimmick here is that I'm running for President in, oh, eight years or so. Consequently, I should be discussing politics like crazy, using it as a platform to draw out my political views and, if I'm really lucky, provide some biting commentary into current politics. Right now, I could cover the primaries - Iowa's caucus is coming up, Nevada is an early caucus state... it would seem natural. There's just one problem:

I think the primaries are inherently flawed.

Let's think about our election process here. It follows some basic steps:

1. A candidate decides that he/she wants to run for public office.
2. Said candidate has to appeal to those that would participate in primaries; those are usually more hard-line elements in their respective parties.
3. After wooing the more extreme elements of their parties, they then complete a primary, during which the hard-line elements select their candidates.
4. Two viable candidates emerge from the primaries and then spend the rest of the campaign doing their best to pretend they didn't say everything they said during the primaries. This causes more moderate voters to view them as phonies and more extreme voters to become disgruntled that their favorite candidate is revoking many of the positions they find near and dear.
5. Those voters who aren't too disgusted with the politicians speaking out of both corners of their mouth show up, hold their nose, and elect somebody.

And we wonder why turnout is so low.

In short, the primary-based system we currently employ does an absolutely amazing job of reducing voter turnout by creating candidates that a vast majority of the country can't stand and causing the candidates that are selected to become almost toxic to their original backers.

The question, of course, is what do we replace it with... and, I hate to say it, but I think France is on to something here.

In France, they have two waves - in the first wave, all of the candidates run together. Then, the top two candidates after the first election run off and go to the next round. Following our political structure, if Republicans were en vogue one year, that would mean we'd have two Republican candidates to choose between - this would come in handy whenever people like Mondale decide to run against people like Reagan. Similarly, if two Democrats were enormously popular, we could choose between those two candidates instead of wasting our time on other undesirable candidates.

Ultimately, our current system isn't designed to pit the top two most popular candidates against each other, though. It's similar to the college BCS - it's less about pitting #1 vs #2 and more about keeping tradition alive, allowing some people to make plenty of money, and giving plenty of voice to extreme elements of both political parties that are loud, active, yet represent a small minority of American voters' interests.

(Can you tell I wrote this on three hours sleep? I can.)