Josh Kraushaar reports that some Republican strategists doubt that a compressed primary schedule is a good idea:

But while most Republicans agree that the process got out of control in 2012, some worry that the party could take things too far in the other direction—limiting the amount of free media exposure the nationally televised debates can provide to compelling up-and-coming candidates.

“It’s the law of unintended consequences. You don’t want to showcase Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Herman Cain,” said one senior GOP operative. “You should want to showcase Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal, and Marco Rubio.”

The conventional wisdom is that the primary schedule and the number and quality of 2012 candidates ended up harming Romney by dragging out the process and forcing him to adopt unpopular positions to secure the nomination, but I’m not sure that is true. Romney didn’t adopt very many new positions during the 2011-12 campaign. His metamorphosis into being a standard-issue movement conservative candidate was almost entirely complete before the second campaign, so he had already taken virtually all of the positions that he campaigned on against Obama before he faced the rest of the Republican field. A shorter nominating contest wouldn’t have left him with much more room to maneuver in the general election than he had. Indeed, because Romney was such a famous panderer and had reinvented himself so thoroughly, any significant changes that he would have tried to make during the general election campaign would have reconfirmed how unreliable and protean his views were.

Republicans keep nominating mediocre or poor candidates, but they want to fault the nominating process for the results. It’s understandable, since that is the part of the process that the RNC can control. However, it also fails to address a more important cause of the party’s weak presidential candidates, which is the incessant boosterism on the right that encourages too many politicians and ex-politicians to think they can and should run. Republicans would probably have more success in finding stronger presidential candidates if they did more to discourage their rising stars from running for president instead of constantly promoting every halfway competent governor or senator as a potential nominee. If we look at things that way, it doesn’t make much sense to want to “showcase” many of the politicians most frequently mentioned as 2016 candidates, since most of them probably shouldn’t even be running this soon.