• The policy favors retread candidates and political dynasties based solely on name identification. If your brother or father ran, you get rewarded. If you ran before, you get rewarded. But if you are a new face, you are penalized.

• The move also benefits personalities and circus acts. If you have a TV show, you will easily have enough name recognition to get into the debates. Doesn’t matter if you’d make a plausible president of the United States. It is a certainty that under this approach if Tom Brady or Jimmy Fallon announced this week that they were running, they’d make the cut. A certainty.

• Other beneficiaries: camera hounds from the political class who live in the Washington and New York media capitals. If you’re a senator or congressman, you can get yourself on cable news four times a week. Or if you’re the governor of New Jersey, you can schlep across the bridge, traffic permitting, and do a bunch of national TV shows.

• The RNC’s approach circumvents the political process. In the past two elections, the winners of the Iowa caucuses, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, were nowhere to be found in national polling the summer before. The same would be true for two little-known governors of Georgia and Arkansas, both of whom went on to call 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. their home.