The Least Insane Choice

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

There's a whole lot that's wrong with the presidential primary system, but the DNC attempted to provide a slight improvement this year by moving Nevada and South Carolina forward.  Part of the thinking was that it would compensate for the whiteness of Iowa and New Hampshire by bringing in Nevada's Hispanics and the large number of black voters in the SC Democratic Party.  It would keep the nominating process in small states, so that the election wouldn't just fall to whoever could raise enough millions to hire an army of organizers and bomb a big media market with ads.  The continued prominence of Iowa and New Hampshire are pretty much indefensible, of course, and I hope that gets revisited next time. 

So the DNC's decision to punish Florida if it keeps trying to leapfrog the schedule is the right one.  Florida knew that they were breaking the schedule when they moved up, and they did it anyway.  At this point, the DNC can either threaten to deprive Florida of delegates, or watch the whole primary calendar disintegrate as states leapfrog each other and schedule surprise primaries for the day after tomorrow. 

One of the more annoying pieces of rhetoric in this comes from Florida Democrats waving the bloody shirt about the 2000 election:

So with time running out before today's showdown in Washington, Florida Democrats started something this week they never bothered with when the law rescheduling the primary was being debated, passed and signed: a full-court public relations offensive.

Party leaders and members of Congress dispatched indignant e-mails to voters, staged conference calls with reporters and even threatened to take Dean to court.

They blamed the Republicans who control the Florida Legislature and invoked the biggest bogeyman of all: the 2000 presidential recount.

''We're going to fight to have Florida Democratic votes counted,'' said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, the state's top Democrat. ``It's always been a top priority for the Democratic National Committee to protect the rights of every eligible American to vote, and we hope the DNC is going to continue to honor this right.''

But a major part of what happened in 2000 involved the Florida Democratic Party screwing the rest of the country -- without Democratic election supervisor Theresa LePore's butterfly ballot, we'd be living in a far better universe. And on that note, let me deliver the earnest snark of Chris Bowers from back when Florida moved its primary forward in violation of the DNC's schedule:

Florida is doing this, I guess, because they feel they don't already have enough say who becomes the next president. No state has suffered more than Florida from the indifference of presidential nominees to non-swing states. If Florida didn't have an early primary, it is highly doubtful that the presidential nominee of either party would ever spend a dime in the state, much less visit. It has been decades since Florida was the deciding state in a presidential election. This is truly a shame, because the air-tight voting systems in Florida fuel more confidence in the hearts of voters than those of any other state in the nation. While in other states, there really isn't a way to ever know who won an election, when people take office in Florida, you know that that person truly has the will of the electorate behind him or her. If more of our elections were like Florida's, then there wouldn't be any need for further election reform in the United States.