The national food fight over who goes first in the ’08 primary season heats up, as states that actually matter are finally and at long last telling Iowa and NH that they can suck it.
The national parties, for reasons I find hard to fathom, are still sticking up for the elitist notion that those 2 states have some sort of hereditary right to the first primary and caucus every presidential election.
They don’t, and they don’t really have the clout to do anything about states that actually matter in the election moving up.
Sanctions? Who cares? Is anyone really going to skip Florida because the DNC is whinging?
Florida lawmakers angrily assailed the Democratic National Committee and its chairman, Howard Dean, saying he is threatening to “disenfranchise” the state’s voters by considering a plan to invalidate the state’s presidential primary.
The DNC’s rules committee is to vote today whether to sanction Florida for violating party rules by moving its primary up to Jan. 29 and violating a party rule against holding a primary before Feb. 5. The action would deny Florida its delegates at the party’s national convention next year and prohibit Democratic presidential candidates from campaigning in the state before the primary.
In a conference call with reporters yesterday, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said the DNC “is poised to assault the basic right of a person to vote at its meeting tomorrow.” He threatened to sue the national party to prevent the sanctions from being imposed.
The bottom line is, this is the end of NH and Iowa’s monopoly on “first in the nation”. They are still vainly trying to hang on, but Iowa will have to move its caucus to 2 years before the election if they keep reacting to other states moving up.
Iowa and NH never should have had this much influence. Its a disgrace its gone on this far. We need a rotating regional plan where every 4 years a slate of states from each region has 3-4 weeks to schedule their caucuses (cauci?) and primaries. Its the only fair way and would end this one-up-manship that’s going on now.
I think NH and Iowa’s legislatures and governors are the ones being childish here, trying to preserve and unfair system that the rest of the country is finally fed up to the teeth with.
Good riddance to the Iowa rush and the NH winter shuffle. I’ve always detested those rituals anyway. They bring to mind the WORST there is in campaigning.
The yahoos in those NH “town meetings” are the biggest drooling morons you’ll see during the campaign. And both those states have rabid lamb liberals who pretty much destroy the Dems almost every year. The entire celebration of Clinton’s political expertise is much exagerated: if G. H. W. Bush hadn’t been derailed by Perot and the Republicans had not given Dole “his turn” Iowa and NH would have delivered their usual loser for the dems.
The big states actually have power, while Iowa and NH have zilch. Its time the bigger states started flexing that muscle. The Florida legislature should pass their OWN law saying our primary has to be a month before NH’s, at minimum, and schedule it for next Thanksgiving. Only by really forcing the issue will this come to a quick and decisive conclusion.
But its over for Iowa and NH, even if they don’t know it yet.