Tim Rogers: Improving the primaries

Good morning.

Life, we are told, is about keeping up with the Joneses.

I don’t know if that is true or not, but it certainly seems to apply to presidential politics.

Or, perhaps more accurately, presidential politics is about getting ahead of the Joneses, or the Iowas or the New Hampshires or the South Carolinas or the Nevadas or whatever other state stands in your way of having the earliest vote.

In the mad dash to be the first state to hold a presidential primary or meaningful delegate awarding caucus, it seems that every state wants to be first, and those states that were first before another state passed them will bump their’s up so they can be first again.

I don’t know if it is legal to hold a primary or caucus before the beginning of the year — although it may well be — and if it is I half expect to hear that the voters of the great state of California or Georgia or Pennsylvania will be going to the polls next week to start selecting the Republicans’ choice to face President Obama more than a year from now.

All of this for the honor, and economic windfall, of being the first state to hold its primary election and presumably set the tenor of the race for the rest of the nation.

In case you haven’t been following the 2012 presidential race quite yet, there have been a flurry of states trying to move their primaries and caucuses to earlier dates to make them more relevant in the selection process.

Last week, we learned that Florida was going to move up its presidential primary to Jan. 31 so the state could position itself as a big dog in deciding the GOP nominee.

The Jan. 31 date would still allow Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina to go first but Florida would come in right behind them.

But other states could still try to jump Florida, and the head of the Florida GOP — and officials from the traditional first four states — said that could force them to move their’s up again.

Missouri has scheduled its primary for Feb. 7 and Michigan and Arizona voters will go to the polls on Feb. 28. But I guess all that is still subject to change and other states could enter the fray. Georgia, by the way, has decided to have its primary on March 6 along with Texas, Massachusetts and several other states. The first Tuesday in March has been called Super Tuesday for the rich load of delegates those states have, but it could be rubber-stamp Tuesday if too many states vote ahead of it.

It is this fear, of course, that is driving this primary jockeying. Voting early means your voters still have a full field to choose from. Voting early means it is more likely that the candidates will visit your state and invest a lot more in winning there. Voting early means TV ads and radio ads and free coffee and doughnuts down at the local diner. Voting early means what you think about Candidate A or B could actually mean something as opposed to the other guy who lives in another state where no one will ever poll.

I’ll admit that I have never understood why Iowa and New Hampshire — and now South Carolina and Nevada — get to go first. Why do their voters get to meet every candidate face to face and the voters from other states not even get to weigh in on who their party will select? Their voters may do a good job of taking their role seriously, but so would the voters of every other state. There is nothing intrinsic about those four states that screams, yes, they are the ones who should get to eliminate candidates before others of us get a chance to pass judgment on them.

The fair thing would be to rotate the primaries so that everyone got the chance to go first at some point. No one cares about the fair thing, however, because power, prestige and a lot of money are all wrapped up in this.

Supposedly, according to the Republican National Committee’s rules, any state other than the Gang of Four caught voting before March 1 will lose half their delegates at the nominating convention. Florida’s officials said OK, we still win if we get to vote early because whoever we select might be able to knock everyone else out and render all the other votes pointless.

All these “early” states run the risk of having this turn into a protracted slugfest on the Republican side — the way the Democrats did in 2008 — and losing influence at the convention. But I am sure they will scream long and loud at the convention to have their full delegates counted if that happens.

What I think would be funny is if all the states try to become first and they all schedule primaries before March 1.

Funny, that is, until we realized how sad it is.

Is this any way to select a president?

There is no question that the two parties need to figure out a system that allows voters in more states to actually get to see and talk to the candidates. That privilege should not just reside with the citizens of Des Moines and Manchester.

But the process by which we pick the next leader of the free world should not resemble the Oklahoma land rush either.

We can’t all be first. We don’t all have to be first. So let’s figure out a way that the most states have a chance to vote on the broadest range of candidates that they can.

That would make all of the primaries important.

Tim Rogers is editor of The Daily Citizen. He can be reached at timrogers@daltoncitizen.com

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