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Tuesday, February 01, 2000 Page: 6A
Primary season in New Hampshire is much like the New Hampshire depicted in
the travel brochures – traditional, old-fashioned, quaint.
In the town meetings, campaign breakfasts and small-town rallies, the
questioning is polite, the pace is slow, the candidates are up close.
In short, it’s everything that presidential campaigning has largely ceased
to be elsewhere. While the quadrennial pilgrimage to the Granite State might
be fun for New Hampshirites, pundits and the state’s hospitality industry, the
much touted “first primary” is the linchpin of an antiquated system that
often robs many Americans, Pennsylvanians included, of their votes when it
comes to choosing presidential candidates. And New Hampshire’s stubborn
refusal to give up its status as the starting gate of presidential politics
continues to block progress toward a system of regional primaries that would
shorten the primary season and give voters across the nation the opportunity
to consider all the candidates, not just those who survive the early tests.
Today in New Hampshire, less than one-half of 1 percent of the nation’s
registered voters will have their way-out-of-proportion say as to who will
represent the major parties in the November election.
If past history, and current polls, hold true, by the time Pennsylvanians
go to the voting booths in April, the issue will be moot, probably having been
decided by “Super Tuesday” on March 7, when electoral-college heavyweights
New York and California and about a dozen other states hold primaries or
caucuses. Other states, such as Indiana, North Carolina and Alabama, which
hold primaries in May or June, will have even less of a chance of affecting
the nomination process.
In recent years, several state parties have jockeyed to move up their
primaries or schedule them in conjunction with other states to give their
voters more weight in the process. New Hampshire, meanwhile, has exercised the
clout of its early-bird election process to lobby against any move to supplant
its status as the first primary, and hence to thwart a number of proposed
reforms that would speed up the process and give voters across the country
equal standing.
And so we remain stuck with a primary process geared more to the age of
radio and railroads than to the era of the Internet and air travel.
A series of regional primaries, scheduled within the space of a month or
two, would end the current front-end loaded process, which eliminates
candidates not to the liking of voters in states with early primaries. And it
would require candidates to choose issues that resonate with voters across the
nation, rather than concentrate on matters that appeal to voters in states
that vote early – tax breaks for ethanol production in Iowa being the prime
example.
So as much as we might miss the coverage of school-gymnasium debates,
covered-dish suppers with the candidates and skeptical voters in small New
Hampshire farming villages, it’s time for the nominating process to enter the
21st century.
We hope this will be the last presidential primary season in which a vote
cast in Wolfeboro, N.H., carries more weight than a vote cast in Wilkes-Barre,
Pa.