for once. I am very rarely in a position to hear him but the other day I happened to listen to a brief portion of his show where he was berating the Iowa/New Hampshire primaries for requiring the candidates to engage in bizzare behavior in order to win. I recall, in particular, that all the candidates are required to show up at union conventions and help prepare breakfast. He wondered how a candidate’s flap-jack flipping ability might relate to his qualifications for president.
The saga continues. What’s wrong with this sentence?
**
I’ll give you a hint. The hamlet of Dixville Notch has a total population of 24. Nineteen are registered to vote, the remaining five are children.
A collosal waste of time, you say? Given a tight, five-way election, this is a sensible use of the candidates time? Well, no, probably not. Because it’s not just that there are only 19 registered voters in Dixville Notch, it’s that out of those 19 registered voters, not a single one is a registered Democrat.
I always find that even when Rush tells the truth, he always manages to tell only half of it, the result is the same as lying to me because one then gets conclusions like yours.
So Rush is right on no Democrats there, but to get the asinine implication of a waste of time, he is not reporting “the rest of the history” as other windbag says.
He is actually telling Democrats, and after the fact even, to not use A) the place with the best resources in the area, and B) don’t follow tradition.
If Kerry is running for re-election four years from now, will you be equally outraged at all the Republican contenders vying for votes in that little town in New Hampshire?
Pretty much. Although at least there will be some Republicans to campaign to.
FTR, BFI only made the comment about flipping flapjacks in the first paragraph. The rest is my analysis and the quote is from today’s NYT.
Doesn’t anyone else find it the least bit surreal that Democratic primary contenders are being forced by “tradition” to campaign in place with no Democratic voters? This is just an extreme example of the trend that Limbaugh was complaining about. Clark does this because he believes that it will get him votes. But why will it get him votes? How is his willingness to campaign in a place with no Democrats an indicator of his fitness to be President? If Lost-in-the-Woods, New Hamshire organizes a seed-spitting contest, should all the candidates participate just to prove they’re “just plain folk?” Should any of them lose a single vote because they refuse to do so?
Iowa and New Hampshire have a hugely disproportionate power over the choices that everyone else in the U.S. has. They can finish off a candidate or raise one up. It is immensely disturbing that the candidates believe that many voters are doing this on a whim. “Oh, that nice Mr. Lieberman came and flipped my flapjacks. He’s got my vote!”
I don’t think this is a bad thing. These two states require a different style of campaigning than we will see after Tuesday. They’re much more personal.
How well a candidate flips pancakes is irrelevant. How does he react when he screws one up? How is he in conversation with people who have never been within 500 miles of the Beltway? How does he come across as a person, what is his personality like, his demeanor?
Iowa and New Hampshire are privileged to have the opportunity to winnow the candidates based on these factors. After Tuesday, the campaigns will be much more based on TV ads and staged rallies. Not that these don’t happen in Iowa and New Hampshire, but the base of the campaigns there are much more person to person. They are not important as to who actually will win the nomination, but as a process to weed out the chaff, they are invaluable.
If the Maine primary had a “polar bear club” tradition, then every four years you would see a bunch of flabby old white men splashing around in the Atlantic ocean.
Eh. Ninety percent of politics is doing stupid stuff to appease some sense of tradition or to cowtow to some sector of society. To point out the sillinesses of Democrat campaigning leaves one open for the sillinesses of Republican (or any other party, for that matter).
Definately. Which is why, this election year, I’m cutting out all the middlemen and voting for the Silly Party Candidate, William Peter David Onion-Garlic Stoatbuger (with a Side of Slaw).
None of you get it, do you? True, there’s only a few voters in Dixville Notch. But they don’t matter either way. At the stroke of midnight, there’ll be a shitload of TV cameras there. Free coverage. What every campaign feeds on. In time for the news in the sections of NH where most voters live. Besides, where else do you think Clark should be at that time?
Hey, the democrats’ behavior is no less bizarre than watching GW Bitch bend over
every day and take it in the ass by Big Business and his Bubba Cheney.
Are our tax dollars paying for his Preparation-H, too?
And as pointed out on West Wing a couple of years ago, he gets to have his name mentioned many times today on all the news channels because of that. He starts the day a WINNER and everyone in the state and the country knows it. this can have an affect on the way the rest of the day goes.
You got it, Lok. That’s the news every New Hampster is waking up to. Not only that, but he has the aura of somebody who’s able and willing to go root out votes while the other guys are sleeping, and therefore would more effectively “fight for us” etc. as President. In a small state, every vote counts disproportionately, ya know.