Primal primary

With the 2000 presidential election a scant three years off, it is understandable that potential candidates would be digging the plaid shirts out from the back of the closet and dusting off the hard hats. The common man schtick takes some rehearsal.

It’s also understandable — yet highly disturbing and utterly counterproductive — that states increasingly are pushing their primaries closer and closer to the start of the campaign season. They’re sick and tired of seeing Iowa and New Hampshire get all the attention. They want their clout and they want it now.

Which leads a group of eight Western states, excluding California, to lay plans for a Rootin’ Tootin’ Super Tuesday all their own, a big ol’ electoral hoedown jammed plumb up against New Hampshire’s bean suppers and Iowa’s corn feeds. Hoo-wee, what a bad idea.

Bad because letting a pair of small, stable and fairly innocuous states have the first say allows candidates to be themselves (to whatever extent that is possible) and to interact with real people before they have to start playing solely to the TV cameras.

And it gives the nation a chance to survey the field without too terribly much at stake. A misstep in Manchester, a gaffe in Sioux City, a rational yet locally unpopular position on an important issue is not fatal. Iowa and New Hampshire start the process of separating the wheat from the chaff, but the chaff has time to regroup.

Why do the Rocky Mountain states want to rock the boat, why do they seek to destroy the one nice, sensible thing left in an otherwise rotten system? “We are not relevant in the process of choosing the president,” says Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, leader of this movement to take cuts in line. Once New Hampshire speaks, it’s all over but the shouting. Just ask President (Pat) Buchanan.

Apparently, the West is fed up with its meager taxpayer-funded diet of free grazing land, cut-rate timber and mammoth water projects. “There’s no politician in his right mind who would say no to New Hampshire,” according to Western Governors Association director Jim Souby, who covets the gold-paved streets of Dixville Notch.

At the national level, the two parties have not passed judgment on the High Plains plan, but they do seem worried about the trend to front-load the primary season. The Republican National Committee initiated at its 1996 convention an incentive to hold off and spread things out by offering a 10 percent delegate bonus to states that hold late primaries.

There are no takers so far. In fact, with state parties unable to exercise restraint, the movement to butt in is picking up steam. Delaware Republicans promptly ignored the RNC’s offer and scheduled their vote the weekend after New Hampshire.

Take last year’s inaugural Yankee Primary. Please. Held a week after New Hampshire, it was meant to give the rest of New England face time with the candidates. Might have worked had not a bunch of delegate-rich Sunbelt states been voting at the same time. The only Mainers who got to see candidates above the level of Morry “The Tire King” Taylor were those who hang around airports.

The result of all this inevitably will be a condensed primary season, a virtual national primary in which the populous states will get all the attention and the smaller ones zip. One bad week and an otherwise worthy candidate will be history.

Denver-based political analyst Floyd Ciruli views what’s going on around him with alarm. He sees the present long, grueling winnowing-out marathon in which candidates must pass a series of tests giving way to a sprint of “killer events.” Candidates will have no time for pie at the diner, no time to tour the tractor factory, no time to meet real Americans.

The big drawback to this looming quasi-national primary, Ciruli says, “is that it largely becomes a money-dominated, media-controlled event.” In other words, it starts to look a lot like the general election. And nobody should want that.