New Hampshire: a plea for reason on the primary date
Walter Shapiro writes on Salon.com to the New Hampshire secretary of state: As a reporter who covered his first New Hampshire primary in 1980 and who reveres its democratic values and traditions, I feel compelled to offer some scheduling advice from the sidelines.
You remain as inscrutable as Alan Greenspan before his memoirs, but I note that the Washington Post has divined from a recent interview that you are tempted to move the primary to December. (After our 90-minute phone conversation in July, about all I divined was that the New Hampshire primary would indeed take place sometime in 2007 or 2008.)
A word of warning: If you try to preserve the primacy of the primary by primly picking a Tuesday in December, you risk New Hampshire's being ridiculed by the late-night comics for voting on 2008 presidential candidates in 2007. As you know all too well, New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation status is hanging by a thread. And holding the primary while the Christmas decorations are still up in Concord will seem to most Americans as absurd as beginning leaf-peeping season in February.
New Hampshire did not cause the front-loading of the system (your primary has been at the head of the class since 1920), but your state will be blamed for it. And in 2012, New Hampshire and Iowa would probably be shoved offstage to be replaced by a national primary, open only to candidates with household names who can raise $150 million before a single vote is cast. -- Save the New Hampshire primary | Salon.com