RUTHFULLY YOURS

The litany of anxieties is endless.

None of the 19 is standing out. Jeb is rustier than they expected. The debates will be a nightmare. Nineteen on one stage??!! There’s talk of making a debate cut to 10, but how? Dropping Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina is a nonstarter. Maybe we ditch the Ricks—Santorum and Perry; they had their shot.

A GOP donor told me recently, “Having 19 candidates is unseemly.” Politics? Unseemly?

Or you could be the Democrats, a party whose candidate is Hillary Clinton, who’s been in the game of pols since before her husband ran against Bob Dole. News reports on the Clinton campaign that aren’t about email keep defaulting to the same words and phrases: coronation, done deal, unchallengeable, foregone conclusion and . . . default.

Between the GOP 19 and the Democratic One over the next year, give me an unseemly political spectacle.

The Republicans’ run to the primaries indeed looks like Darwinian selection. But it will be a useful and productive process of political vetting. Ask Jeb Bush, who already took a hit on Iraq. Or Chris Christie; declared dead in February, he’s back.

Yes it could degrade into familiar GOP chaos, but more likely the best, fittest candidate will emerge to take on Hillary and the Big Blue Machine that may have to prop her up for 17 months.

Gov. Christie has been saying that a candidate’s personality matters a lot in a presidential election. He’s right. What’s striking about the GOP 19, though, is how many of these big personalities already are running on policy substance to distinguish themselves.

Mr. Christie has stolen a march on the field by delivering three detailed speeches on entitlements, tax reform and national security. But Marco Rubio, Gov. Bush, Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz—privately or in public—have all shown a good grasp of policy detail.

Credit the man who isn’t running for this turn— Paul Ryan. Rep. Ryan elevated the Republican game with his detailed policy “road maps.” Dismissed by some as quixotic, the road-map model seems to have become the benchmark of seriousness for Republican candidates. This is progress.

Which brings us to the Republicans’ quadrennial Roman Colosseum—the primary debates.

I have no doubt that some mathematician will figure out how to put nine talkative men and one woman on a stage, or even 20 of them, and avoid consuming all the airtime on the two great issues of our day: “regaining control of the borders” and whether the Iraq war was a “mistake.”

The primaries wouldn’t be the same without these gladiatorial arenas to kill off the weak, but something more is needed this time.

One answer, as so often, lies with Ronald Reagan’s template. In 1980, Reagan’s campaign paid for the New Hampshire primary debate. “I am paying for this microphone.” Reinvent the Reagan model.

In addition to the traditional debates, the candidates or their supporters should underwrite a series of smaller debate/conversations. Divide the 19 into groups of four or five candidates, randomly selected. Pick the issues, and go at it. Give voters a chance to see who these mostly interesting people are and how their minds work outside the confines of a 60-second timer.

The moderator’s job would be to break clinches. Other than that, let ’em have at it. People say they “like” Scott Walker for what he did in Wisconsin. Agreed. Let’s see how he handles himself over 10 rounds with three other Republicans before climbing into the big ring with Mrs. Clinton.

The Democrats don’t need the Roman Colosseum. They’ve got the Clinton Foundation. It isn’t every day you get to see a candidate create her own trial by ordeal, but Hillary Clinton has done it with evaporating emails and speaking mega-fees.

So long as the Clinton mess stays this side of being legally actionable, Hillary Clinton will be in Iowa next February to pocket the caucuses she lost in 2008. Still, how did an American political party of such size and history become so sclerotic that beyond one candidate, there’s no one—other than Joe Biden and John Kerry?

Barack Obama was a Democratic anomaly. He became president at 47 in large part because he slipped through his party’s coast-to-coast bedrock of aging officeholders-for-life. If the NBA were run like the Democratic Party, Charles Barkley would still be starting for the Houston Rockets and James Harden would be on the bench.

For now, the Republicans are running 19 to 1. It may be unseemly, but last time I looked, there’s never been a coronation in the United States.