From RealClearPolitics.com

As Republican National Committee chairman Mike Duncan and other top officials urged committee members to focus on electing John McCain in November, Republican chairmen from key states are already looking forward to the 2012 nominating contest, battling over a plan that would advantage smaller states while keeping larger states in rotating pods in the contest's later months.

The party's rules committee, on Wednesday, passed an amended version of what is known as the "Ohio Plan," which would allow smaller states to hold presidential nominating contests before a rotating group of larger states, loosely grouped based on their electoral votes. Those twenty-three smaller states, including Iowa and New Hampshire, would be permitted to hold earlier nominating contests, while twenty-seven larger states would be divided into three groups, organized loosely by electoral votes.

Backers of Ohio's proposal say the new scheme would force candidates to prove that they can run both retail campaigns and a big media-driven operation. Ohio GOP chair Bob Bennett, who spear-headed the plan, said the system as it is now rewards "the candidate who can raise the most money the earliest." "The concept is, do you believe in retail politics or don't you," he said. Allowing smaller states to go first will limit the impact of money, at least somewhat, giving a smaller state's candidate the chance to compete with the big fish. "You ought to be able to elect a candidate from Maine, or Kansas, or Wyoming," Bennett said.

The pre-approved window in which each of the pods would hold their contests will also shift backwards, opening in March, not February, and avoiding the necessity of a Holiday season campaign frenzy.

New Hampshire Republican Party chairman Fergus Cullen, whose state would likely retain its first-in-the-nation primary under the plan, questioned why anyone thought the nominating process was broken to begin with. But the Ohio system, he said, will retain the current system's best aspects while strengthening weaknesses. "We're pleased," he said.

But the plan drew immediate rebukes from officials from larger states, who promised to substitute a different option or scuttle the proposal on the convention floor in St. Paul this September, if not before.

"The Ohio plan relegates states like California permanently to the bottom half of the batting order," Golden State GOP chair Ron Nehring said. "I'm not going back to my state and tell Californians that they're permanently second tier."

"We've got to go back to the drawing board," Texas Republican Party chair Tina Benkiser said. "It's got to be a fair process. This is about the voters having a choice."

The Ohio plan is "an unacceptable concept," Michigan Republican Party chairman Saul Anuzis said. With Nehring, Anuzis is organizing states in hopes of defeating the measure before it heads to a convention for avote. Anuzis said he had commitments from fourteen states, including several larger bodies that will bring big delegations to the Minnesota convention. "There's a growing consensus that we have to have another plan emerge," he said. "I'm hearing a lot of talking going on," Benkiser said. "I would hope that there would be other plans discussed."

Anuzis and Nehring each said they favor a plan offered by the Benkiser's Texas delegation, which features rotating groups that include every state, or a plan endorsed by the National Association of Secretaries of State, which is similarly flexible.