America is threatened by many crises, ranging from economic
recession to international terrorism, but none of these threats are
quite so immediate or so fundamentally hostile to our democratic
form of government as the existential menace of Florida.
Perhaps this is a slight exaggeration, but not by too
much, when you consider the multiple ramifications of Florida’s
announced plan to hold its 2012 presidential primary on Jan. 31.
This would completely wreck the primary schedule as other states
move up their dates, and would also result in the Republican
National Committee stripping Florida of half its delegates to next
year’s convention, which will be held in Tampa. So Republicans in
the host state of the GOP convention would be punished for a
decision made by their own elected Republican leaders, who seem
indifferent to the consequences.
“We know the risk we’re taking, but we’re
talking about satisfying maybe 100 people versus 19 million people
who could have a say in who the nominee is,” Florida state Senate
president
Mike Haridopolos told the Wall Street Journal, as if a
Florida primary in March — where it should be, according to RNC
rules — would be utterly irrelevant to the nomination process.
This kind of pretzel-logic is inexplicable to sane people, but
we’re talking about Florida Republicans, whose former state party
chairman, Jim Greer, tried to rig the state’s 2010 Senate primary
with an early endorsement for former Gov. Charlie Crist. That
classic example of Florida GOP shenanigans sparked a grassroots
uprising that elected Marco Rubio to the Senate and drove Crist out
of the party completely, while Greer is currently awaiting trial on
felony corruption charges..
But while Florida GOP leaders evidently either don’t know
or don’t care what’s good for their own state party, the
repercussions of their madness will be felt far beyond the Sunshine
State. A Jan. 31 date for Florida’s primary would result in four
other events on the presidential campaign calendar — the Iowa
caucuses, the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, and the
Nevada caucuses — also leap-frogging to January dates. And while
some may shrug at this truncation of the schedule, it undermines
the entire rationale of the primary system.
There are logical reasons why the Iowa caucuses and the
New Hampshire primaries, especially, have become sacrosanct as the
first events of the quadrennial presidential campaign calendar.
Both are states with small populations (Iowa about 3 million, New
Hampshire about 1.3 million) where TV and radio advertising are
relatively cheap. This permits little-known long-shots with small
budgets to campaign on a fairly even playing field with
better-known and better-funded candidates. Furthermore, Iowa and
New Hampshire are states where retail politics — the old-fashioned
business of shaking hands and meeting voters one-on-one or in small
meetings — are a huge factor in the campaign. Barack Obama
famously beat Hillary Clinton in Iowa four years ago because of
Obama’s greater strength in grassroots organizing, and Jimmy Carter
won New Hampshire in 1976 by bringing scores of Georgians (the
“Peanut Brigades”) to go door-to-door for him in the Granite State.
So unless we wish presidential campaigns to become all about money
and what pollsters call “name ID,” having Iowa and New Hampshire go
first looks like a good idea.
Yet we ought not confine ourselves to merely logical
reasons for keeping Iowa and New Hampshire first. Aren’t
Republicans conservatives, and don’t conservatives believe in the
value of tradition? There is something wonderfully traditional —
indeed, downright reactionary — about having presidential
candidates go through the quaint custom of waiting for returns from
tiny precinct caucuses in Iowa and shaking hands with voters in the
snowy streets of small-town New Hampshire in February. Nor are
these traditions merely sentimental. The pragmatic and utilitarian
value of tradition is evident in that voters of Iowa and New
Hampshire, long accustomed to their role in vetting presidential
candidates of both parties, have become quite shrewd judges in
these matters. A joke told
by Tim Albrecht, spokesman for Iowa Gov. Terry Brandstad, is
quite relevant here: An Iowa Republican is asked whether he
supports a certain presidential candidate and answers, “I don’t
know. I’ve only met him twice.” Early-state voters are not
over-awed by “rock star” candidates and media hype, because they’ve
seen it all so many times before. Such is the real value of
tradition.
Floridians might argue that there is no reason Iowa and
New Hampshire can’t still go first, just because the Sunshine State
moves it’s primary up to Jan. 31, True enough, but the likely
impact of that move would be to trample on other events in our
American tradition, including Christmas and football. Until 1984,
before the recent craze for “front-loading” the primary calendar,
the New Hampshire primary was held the first Tuesday in March.
(Iowa’s caucuses were more variable, with dates ranging from Jan.
19 in 1976 to Feb. 20 in 1984.) That schedule permitted at least a
couple of weeks, and sometimes more than a month, for survivors of
the Iowa ordeal to campaign in New Hampshire. For more than two
decades, however, New Hampshire has been forced to fend off threats
to its legislatively mandated first-in-the-nation primary by
scheduling earlier and earlier, in turn forcing Iowa to do the
same. Four years ago (largely because of Florida’s insistence on an
early date), Iowa held its caucuses on Thursday, Jan. 3, and New
Hampshire’s primary was Tuesday, Jan. 8.
With such a speeded-up schedule, not only are candidates
effectively forced to choose between the two first states in making
their final campaign thrusts — a candidate who emphasizes Iowa can
scarcely avoid the appearance of snubbing New Hampshire, and
vice-versa — but the business of campaigning intrudes on the
Christmas holidays. And now that college football has instituted
the Bowl Championship Series, the national champ isn’t crowned on
New Year’s Day but rather (this year) in New Orleans on Jan. 9. Do
Floridians really want to force people to choose politics over
football and Christmas? Before the talk of a Jan. 31 Florida
primary, Iowa had scheduled its caucuses for the reasonable date of
Feb. 6 (the Monday after the Super Bowl) so that Americans could
get a late-December holiday break from politics, and no football
fan could complain.
Many people have tried to talk sense to Haridopolos and
the other Florida Republicans who seem determined to inflict
January insanity on the nation. Paul Senft, the state’s Republican
National Committeeman,
warned that moving up the primary “will alienate the remainder
of the country.” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus is said to be
attempting to negotiate some way to avert this disaster, and yet
the Floridians seem to think themselves entitled to dictate terms
to the rest of the GOP. In an
interview with the Hill, Florida Republican strategist
Justin Sayfie said that if Priebus stripped the state party of half
its delegates to the Tampa convention as punishment for breaking
the rules, it would be a “slap in the face to the Republican
leadership in the state of Florida.”
No “leadership” would ever have deserved a slap in the
face more than if the madmen leading the Florida GOP wreck the 2012
schedule — and as collateral damage, ruin Christmas — for the
rest of America.
