What the 2008 Primary Season Will Look Like [View All]

[Bucky]

The '08 Democratic primaries are going to be a lot like old millionaire sex. It'll promise a lot of action, cost a lot of money, arrive in fancy limosines, and the whole thing will be over with before it starts to get interesting. When you look at the calendar, it's surprising just how close we are to settling on a Democratic nominee. Those of you upset at the supposedly vicious tone of this year's campaigns will be happy to know that it'll all be over with soon.

The purpose of my post today is to take that happiness away from you. (Warning: this post runs a little long, so you may just want to jump down to the maps if you want to see the future.)

History

The calendar we have for selecting our party's candidate for president is designed to frustrate you. Or rather it's not designed at all. When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s all the action happened in the spring and summer, because each state's delegation to the nominating convention actually mattered. As big money and television-enformed impressions about who's a "real winner" become more important in nominating contests, states started jockeying for who got its election in first. The sooner you got the candidates into your state, the more your mattered in the nomination process.

It was a matter of getting the most bang for your buck. This was almost unregulated free enterprise in action, except instead of reducing prices to attract more consumer, states were reducing the length of the campaign calendar to attract more election year promises from the next president. This is why everybody "loves" those farm subsidies that everyone hates. Anyone wanting to be president first has to kiss every cornhole in Iowa. There's a real economic reason why states want their voters to matter in selecting both parties' nominees.

Because of all this elbowing to the front of calendar, traditional March primaries quickly turned into traditional January primaries and people started complaining that just two states--Iowa and New Hampshire--were picking our nominees. States that tried to horn in on the action, like Florida and Michigan this year, got unpleasant smackdowns. The DNC was deeply committed to publicly protecting the two leading states' priviledged positions. The Beltway establishment did not want to confront a growing problem of our frontloaded contest.

Economics

Like any regulated market, the regulated party primary dates finally ended up being bunched up around an equilibrium point where they could maximize their bang-to-buck ratio without pissing off the regulator, the DNC. In the 1990s this bunch-up equilibrium point was called Super Tuesday and it happened in March. This year market forces have compelled the states to jump up ahead of that line, making the first Tuesday in March more like Superfluous Tuesday--because every vote cast that late in the contest will indeed be superfluous. The rush was on this last year to the next bunch up point, which given current marketing fads should probably be called "Extreme Tuesday Tuesday Tuesday" with a booming Monster Truck Rally announcer's voice. That event will land on the first Tuesday in February.

And those states' primaries probably won't matter either.

Gym class

As of tomorrow, December 22nd, we will be exactly two weeks away from the kick off event for the 2008 contest--the Iowa caucuses. In the four to five weeks that follow, the contest will be settled and we can all go back to just loathing the Republicans again.

This is how it'll go. For the month of January our candidates will bounce around the country in a crazy ricochet of events occuring just days apart. Each state after New Hampshire in this maze will get about a week's worth of love from the dwindling number of Democrats. During January the candidates will drop off one at a time like hotel visitors in an Agatha Christe novel, the deranged survivors moving onto the next showdown.

If this sounds anything like a reality show to you, you watch too much television. But here's the map.



After eveyone pledges their troth to gasohol subsidies, they'll rush off to New Hampshire for five days of frantic posturing and subtle ripostes of Wildean wit (e.g. "DINO", "corporate tool", and "unelectable hypocrite"). After New Hampshire two candidates will drop out, and neither will be Mike Gravel. Chris Dodd will go back to being a "kick ass senator" (make sure you swing your fist like Alison Stewart when you say that). And unless two of the three leading candidates self-implode Joe Biden will go back to force-feeding sanity into America's foreign policy. Of course none of the top three will self-implode.

A week after New Hampshire Sen. Clinton will do a victory lap around the state of Michigan. The rest of the week she'll be hanging around with everyone but John Edwards in Nevada for four days (he'll be in South Carolina all week). Bill Richardson will try and cash in his airplane ticket to Charleston later that Saturday night. One week after that, somebody will probably deliver the coup de grace to his or her remaining rivals in South Carolina. On the off chance that there's still two viable contenders left standing after South Carolina, then all the candidates will immediately break their promises not to campaign in Florida for three days. This will be described as a "last ditch effort" for at least one candidate.

Tuesday! Tuesday! Tuesday! Your vote doesn't matter!


Then comes Monster Truck Tuesday. A more accurate descriptor would be Crematorium Tuesday, since any candidate still lingering in denial that they're not going to win will have their bones burned away to ashes here. It will essentially be a big loud Amen to the short disappointing sermon that was the 2008 primary election.

During the first week in February we'll wondering how our inevitable nominee will explain not debating the message candidates still in the race. Their campaign won't actually have to explain anything, of course, because the mainstream media won't really want to discuss Kucinich, even though he'll perform surprisingly well in at least two mid-February contests.

Fox will interview Cynthia McKinney a lot. Sean Hannity will ask her, "I know you hate America, but why is the Democrat party so racist in the way they've marginalized you?"


During the Chesapeake Tuesday campaigns, a half a dozen not-technically-affiliated-with-the-Romney-campaign "citizen groups" will start market testing their smear campaigns against the "character issues" our inevitable nominee has. The campaigning will be over with and anything that happens in Washington, Wisconsin, haWaii will be afternoon rallies in the park, followed by exclusive fat cat fundraisers in Seattle, Millwaukee, and Honolulu at night.


Now at long last we get to March and what was once Super Tuesday. People in Texas, Ohio, and a couple of New England states will gripe about never having any influence in presidential campaigns. A few will bemoan why we picked the inevitable nominee, who according to the mainstream media (now mimicking Fox News mimicking the RNC talking points mimicking the smear campaigns not technically affiliated with the Romney campaign) has severe character issues, is a flip flopper, and soft on terrorism and illegal immigration. After all, didn't we have some other candidates who clearly don't have character issues since you never hear of them being smeared on TV?


Finally, like a passionless cheek kiss at the end of a "I think we should see other people" afternoon coffee talks, we get to the real dinosaurs, the irrelevant states that hold their primaries and caucuses in the spring and the trilobites who cling to summer dates. They might get a few visits from the "surprising, yet perfectly logical" choice for vice president. They'll get to witness Mitt Romney pulling even with our inevitable nominee in the polls.


The inevitable nominee and the veep-nominee-designate will talk about the big crowds and the energetic spirit of the people they meet. They'll say America is ready for change. They won't make a big deal about the disturbing fringe reports coming out of Michigan and Florida about voter purges, or the quirks in the new voting machines in West Virginia can California, or the quiet meetings Romney and his veep-to-be are having in New York, or the clever new tricks I can't predict coming out of Pennsylvania and Ohio. They'll be too busy trying to counter spin the sexual insinuations being tossed at them by bloggers who, if they're Republican bloggers, seem to get an unusual amount of coverage in the mainstream media.

They'll be too busy making speeches about how important this particular election is to the survival of our democracy.