Better Than We Deserve

Wouldn’t we be much better off with a shorter, more compact presidential campaign season? One that began less idiosyncratically than the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, maybe in places that are more representative of the country, or at least more representative of the regions of the country? One that didn’t drag on so long?

Sure we would—if, that is, you think that the best way to choose a husband or wife is to start with a video dating service and continue with a few big-event dates, followed by a short engagement and a big wedding.

Me, I’d rather take a little time choosing the person I will be sharing the next four or eight years of my life with. I’d like to have the time to play the field, meet a number of interesting people, spend some time with a few, see how well they wear over time, find out what they’re like after they’re no longer on their best first-or second-date behavior. It takes more time and costs more money. But it’s better, I think, than acting in haste and repenting at leisure.

Which is why the pace and process we use to pick our candidates makes a good deal of sense to me.

We could hold the first and potentially dispositive primaries in states like California, New York and Texas that are so big and diverse that they come close to representing the country. But their size, and the number of major cities—read media markets—they contain, would doom long-shot shoe-leather campaigns like Mike Huckabee’s.

Mid-size states like Ohio, Georgia, Colorado and Massachusetts would be bigger and more diverse than Iowa and New Hampshire, but they come with their own distorting atypicalities: Ohio with its rust-belt concerns, Georgia with racial and religious strains, Colorado with the issues that come with its extraction industries and land use disputes, and Massachusetts with Boston and its outsize self regard.

Most important, none of these states would require the personal contact between voters and candidates that New Hampshire does, or the personal contact among voters that Iowa does.

I don’t want to claim too much for Iowa and New Hampshire’s unique virtues. Many a marriage has collapsed even after a long, intimate, and communicative courtship. But only in New Hampshire and, to a lesser extent in Iowa, do voters have a decent chance of seeing and talking to candidates in person, of seeing how assuredly a candidate reacts to an unexpected question or situation, of watching candidates’ demeanor when they’re tired or stressed. No other state receives the sustained attention from candidates that allows voters to watch them and their positions on issues evolve, deepen or stagnate.

Without the relatively close personal contact that New Hampshire and Iowa afford, voters’ contact with candidates would be limited to the candidates’ made-for-TV personae, and their chances of anything but the most superficial understanding of the next president would be about the same as the chances of getting to know the characters in Friends or Seinfeld.

Like New Hampshire’s small size, Iowa’s caucus system makes a unique contribution to the process of selecting presidential candidates. Under the caucus system, on election day, voters report to their polling places at the appointed time. The voters who favor each candidate gather in various parts of the room. Every candidate whose followers represent at least 15% of those in attendance will be allotted delegates. Candidates whose supporters make up less than 15% of those present aren’t allotted delegates, so they set about trying to talk other candidates’ supporters into coming over to bring them up to 15%, or they are entreated to join the forces of their second-choice candidate so that their convictions will not be totally unrepresented going forward. What other part of the process prompts voters to talk to each other about candidates or issues? What other part of the process leads them to think about the tradeoffs that are part of the political process?

The national media attention lavished on the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries does seem out of proportion to their limited national importance. But the attention invested in these two states is stockpiled and drawn against over the following months, when the relentless rush of if-this-is-Tuesday-it-must-be-Nevada primaries forces candidates to limit their contact with voters to TV and Internet ads and recorded robo-call messages.

Like its Iowa and New Hampshire venues, the length of the campaign has more advantages than disadvantages. It seems interminable, especially the many months before the first votes are cast: pubic campaigning for the next election starts not much more than halfway through the term of the president elected in the last election and, in the case of Hillary Clinton, almost immediately after her re-election to a second six-year term in the US Senate.

But look at what we’ve learned during this vast expanse of months. We’ve learned that Hillary Clinton, one of whose chief assets we thought would be the ability to hit an opponent back twice as hard as she was hit, is having trouble countering the relatively light punches thrown by debate moderators and the Obama campaign. We’ve learned that although votes are popularly supposed to follow money, the McCain campaign’s seemingly inexhaustible campaign war chest was not sufficient to keep him from sliding from first among Republican candidates to a near-tie with Ron Paul. And we learned that the lack of money was not enough to keep Mike Huckabee from breaking out of a near-tie with Ron Paul and into the top tier. We’ve learned that Rudolph Giuliani’s relatively liberal views on social issues, supposedly anathema to conservative Iowa caucusers, aren’t; that, in fact, social conservative leaders, supposedly Robespierre-like ideologues, would rather be on the winning side—Giuliani’s, Romney’s, anyone’s—than on what they believe to be the right side.

The long run-up to the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primaries and all that follows has turned out, in other words, to be long enough to force the candidates out from behind their plan-A campaign strategies. And their movement to plans B, C and D has been more revealing than we might have expected, and much more revealing than any two- or three-month speed-date campaign could ever have been.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the virtues—and vices—of the current process are largely a matter of luck. The primacy of the Iowa and New Hampshire contests are not the result of a plan to offer voters the opportunity to make considered choices. Rather, they are at best the accidental consequences of each of the two states’ desires to reap the economic and political benefits of attention from candidates and the media. And who can blame them? Who else has a better right to those benefits?

The problem is not the failure of Iowa and New Hampshire to take the national weal into account in scheduling their elections. The problem is that the campaigns and elections that lead up to the choice of our country’s only nationally-elected official is driven not by anyone’s idea of the best way to choose a president but by the kind of state-against-state rivalries the U.S. Constitution was devised to avoid. We’ve been lucky that these rivalries have produced the process they have. It could be much worse.

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