Benefits of the N.H. Primary
Benefits of the N.H. Primary
The Democratic National Committee task force charged with establishing Democrat policy on future presidential primaries, voted 23-2 last Saturday, to diminish the New Hampshire Primary’s role in choosing future party standard bearers by adding more state caucuses immediately before the New Hampshire Primary and by adding additional state primaries right behind the New Hampshire Primary.
Why whack New Hampshire? Well, according to the DNC, its because we’re, well, just “too white.”
If the Republican National Committee had acted similarly and voted to dead-end the New Hampshire Primary because we were just, “too black,” as U.S. Marshall, Rooster Cogburn, warned Texas Ranger, La Boeuf, it would be as if a ton of bricks had fallen on the RNC. The ACLU, NAACP, and every leftward acronym from ABC to XYZ would have jumped on the RNC and stuck like white on rice. Republicans nation wide would be excoriated. They’d weld Bush to Jefferson Davis. No Republican could escape the mud. Neither Mattie Ross, Lawyer Daggett, Daniel Webster, Jimmy Cochran or all the King’s horses or all the King’s men could put the Republican Party together again.
Face it. The DNC vote was racist.
A few N.H. Democrats get it. Because Democratic Party insiders knew that the DNC outcome was a given, for weeks Kathy Sullivan, N.H. Democratic Party Chair, and her Governor, John Lynch have been preparing for the worst and working hard to inoculate their N.H. Democrats from the predictable effect of just such outlandishness – talking and writing incessantly about how important it is to preserve New Hampshire’s first in the nation status. Sullivan, and Lynch, are now, back peddling even faster now than they were before the DNC vote. After all, wanting their slate of state and congressional candidates to win in November elections, what else would they do? New Hampshire too white to play? Kill the N.H. Primary? No way! On the other hand, move Sullivan and Lynch out of state, say to Michigan or New Mexico – put them on the same DNC panel – would they vote with the 23?
Winning, not principle, is at the root of DNC gaming.
The idea that New Hampshire is too white to meaningfully participate in choosing political candidates is just too outlandish – unless one is entirely ignorant of New Hampshire’s revolutionary history, political history, Civil War participation and libertarian proclivities. Unlike 20s, 30s and 40s, Vermont, New Hampshire never had a rolling eugenics movement. With its mills and factory towns full of Catholic immigrants, New Hampshire was infertile ground for the Klu Klux Klan.
Though sketchy on religious tolerance, New Hampshire has had a long tradition of social justice, especially opposing slavery. Opposing the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which simultaneously admitted Maine and Missouri to the Union while preserving slavery below a line drawn even with Missouri’s southern border, N.H. Congressman Arthur Livermore, son of N.H.’s revered revolutionary, Samuel Livermore, asked his colleagues in the U.S. House, “ How long will the desire for wealth render us blind to the sin of holding both the bodies and souls of our fellow men in chains?” Arthur Livermore, a fervent abolitionist at work.
On the lawn of the N.H. State House, the statue of famous abolitionist, John Hale, points accusingly at the statue of New Hampshire’s only President, Franklin Pierce, Hale, berating Pierce for supporting