Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Thompson Goes AWOL and New Hampshire Voters are Spoiled

News report:

Besides participating in his first presidential debate in Michigan last Tuesday, Thompson was missing from the campaign trail. The former Tennessee senator and star of NBC’s “Law & Order” was scheduled to be in New Hampshire this weekend, but canceled.

Fred’s a very exasperating candidate to support. I’m now in the “well, he’s the lesser of all available evils” camp.

From the same report:

New Hampshire voters noticed.  “He’s a late entry. That will probably hurt him,” said Geri Gormley, of Bow, who visited with McCain but remains uncommitted. “We’re grass roots. Candidates come up and pick our brains, one on one. We had (Barack) Obama’s staff come to our door today. That’s good strategy.”

Is there anybody more spoiled than a NH voter? Except maybe an Iowa caucus voter? Of course, living in such wretched places, getting your butt kissed every four years by prospective leaders of the free world must be about the only thing that makes life bearable.

I now look forward to another deluge of hate email from the denizens of Iowa and NH. So let’s go whole hog and remind folks of something I wrote a while back:

Obviously, the whole country has a substantial interest in the process by which the two major parties pick their candidates for President. Yet, neither Iowa, New Hampshire, nor South Carolina is particularly representative of the country as a whole. We need a meaningful reexamination of the Presidential process in which the parochial interests of three otherwise rather unimportant states are not allowed to preempt what is in the national interest....

We let three pissant states act as the principal filters for picking our Presidents. This has pernicious effects. Would corn-based ethanol be so high on the list of energy ideas if Iowa wasn’t the first state to hold a Presidential caucus? I don’t think so, given how large the carbon footprint of producing ethanol is. Would GOP candidates genuflect at Bob Jones if South Carolina wasn’t the key to recovering from a loss in NH? Would GOP candidates endorse flying the flag of treason - i.e., the Confederate battle flag - if SC, the birthplace of secession, were not so important? And would NH serve any useful purpose other than as a place for Massachusetts tax exiles to live if it weren’t the first primary?

The unseemly race going on to have the first primary simply makes my case even stronger.