This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 21st, 2012.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Have Super PACs harmed the GOP's effort to find a nominee this year?

They've certainly extended the lives of some

campaigns and subjected Mitt Romney to added scrutiny, so where's the harm?

John Samples, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Representative

Government, comments.

Well, one thing to keep in mind in politics, people complain about things and then

when you do something different, they often complain about that and it's usually

a different set of people complaining or at least you hope so.

In this case people used to complain about front loading of the primaries and the whole decision being taken really quickly and so that by the time

you hit Super Tuesday it was all over.

So the parties responded and part of this has nothing to do with money at all.

Part of it has to do with the rules of selecting delegates.

The Republicans said nobody who has a no state who has a primary before April 1st can have winter take all rules and what that

meant was that as we saw yet in the Illinois primary with Mitt Romney he won

strongly but he even then he only got three out of four

delegates at the issue so it just takes a long a lot longer time to

amass the delegates when you can't have these winner-take-all rules.

That's part of the story.

And certainly the other part of this story is that the one clear result of the speech now

and Citizens United decisions has been that the

...