What?? A December 11th Primary Date For NH??

This is just nutty:



December Primary in New Hampshire? It's His Call.
Secretary of State Alone Will Decide, but He's Not Saying

By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 12, 2007; A01



CONCORD, N.H. -- The New Hampshire primary, crowded by other wannabe primaries and caucuses, may be shifted from January to an unprecedented date in early December. It all depends on the calculations of one man.

"I have a lot of discretion," said Bill Gardner, the 16-term secretary of state of New Hampshire, who is invested with what amounts to dictatorial power to set the date under state law. "We are prepared, if it needs to be early December, it can be early December."

Or it may stick to a date in early January. Gardner is still playing coy, though increasingly less so, with his open hints about December.

In recent weeks, "What Is Bill Gardner Thinking?" has become the major political parlor game in presidential politics. He is, unfortunately, brilliantly obtuse. He has the gift of genial obfuscation. Exploring his thinking process is like trying to stab an olive with a plastic cocktail sword.

Ask him a direct question -- and The Post did just that this week over the course of seven hours and a long drive in Gardner's Volvo from Concord to Keene and back, with dinner in between -- and he'll answer with a series of sentence fragments, digressions, anecdotes and ambiguities. His elusiveness is strategic: He wants to keep all his options open.

<snip>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/11/AR2007101102109_pf.html

the early primary/no early primary in Florida would sort of be moot at this point, right? Wrong?

But I could be wrong. In any case, setting the NH primary in Dec should be a wakeup call: The primary system is irredeemably compromised.

to say about this later.

I only wished my vote would at least count. Oh well.

bother me that I live in a small late primary state; that's really not my reason for thinking the system is screwed up. For me, it's that over the past few cycles, we've moved into a near perpetual campaign for the presidency.

One primary, same date, every state, right now.

to big money. Candidates would just run ads in CA, FL and a couple other big states, and they'd be even more insulated from the voters. I don't know what the answer is, but that's not it.

Big money already controls it.

The candidates are more isolated from voters now than they would be if we adopted the remedy I just endorsed.

Oh my gosh! We could have our first votes next week!

Primaries and caucuses are best as a process, not a race in itself.