Stopping the primary madness
WHAT A strange experience denizens of this state had earlier this month. We in Massachusetts actually mattered.
We were not just relevant, but courted, coveted, and sought after as presidential primary voters.
The candidates made their case on the TV airwaves. Glossy fliers arrived in the mail. Phone bankers were busy dialing.
On Feb. 4, a sizable turnout had gathered at Faneuil Hall by 8:30 a.m. to hear Republican John McCain make his pitch deep in the heart of Mitt Romney territory. That afternoon, a large crowd at Clark University in Worcester cheered as Democrat Hillary Clinton made her case there. And late that night, a huge gathering greeted Barack Obama at the World Trade Center in Boston.
With more than 1.75 million Massachusetts voters going to the polls Super Tuesday, we set a raw numbers record, while coming close to the 43.9 percent who voted in the 1980 primary.
Why, but for a little more snow - and a few state-run liquor stores - we could almost have been in New Hampshire. It was heady times for the Commonwealth. And a big break with the recent past.
''It used to be that the only way to participate in presidential primary politics was to raise or contribute money,'' remarks Alan Solomont, chairman of the Obama campaign's New England steering committee. ''We were the ATM.''
Some presidential years, certainly, we have been consigned to primary oblivion.
In part, that's because Massachusetts has put a plethora of its own candidates forward in the last eight campaigns. On the Democratic side, there was Ted Kennedy in 1980, Michael Dukakis in 1988, Paul Tsongas in 1992, and John Kerry in 2004. And in this year, of course, we had Mitt Romney on the Republican side.
Having a home-state favorite usually takes you out of primary play, though Romney's candidacy didn't deter John McCain from at least making a campaign foray behind enemy lines.
In other years, we've lost out because there were more enticing targets other places or because the nominees were all but decided early on. Now, with 24 states, including California, holding contests on Super Tuesday, we still didn't get our fair share of attention. No state did. California deserves at least a week unto itself.
Still, though the campaign was short, the drama was high. All in all, it's been a year to make voters realize the excitement of being in the mix. That's why this state's political leaders should push for the kind of primary process that will help us stay relevant.
The best bet is the plan for a system of rotating regional primaries favored by the National Association of Secretaries of State, which recently put out a new report highlighting its proposal (read it at www.nass.org).
The same idea has been offered as legislation by US Senators Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota; Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee; and Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent.
Under such a scheme, the nation would be divided into four geographic regions - East, Midwest, West, and South - with roughly the same number of delegates. The first such regional primary day would be in March, the next in April, the third in May, and the last in June. After drawing lots to determine the order, the states within a region would all hold their contests on the first Tuesday of their assigned month or sometime during the following week.
Every four years, the order would rotate; thus each region would periodically get to go first. Iowa and New Hampshire would retain their early status to keep retail politics important in the process.
''This plan is the best chance for all the states to have a voice,'' says Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin.
No plan is perfect, but this one has several important selling points.
By spacing the process out, it would give more voters more time to take the measure of the candidates and play a real role in deciding the nominees. It would also allow more time between contests for candidates to raise funds. The current process ''is disorderly and unfair to candidates who don't have as much money,'' says Klobuchar. ''This way, they would at least have some opportunity to develop over time.''
There would be less chance that the early contests would effectively decide the nominee, as is prone to happen under the current chaotic system (though not this year). Nor would any one date require the frantic cross-country hopscotch that Super Tuesday did. ''The way our system is right now it is much more of a tarmac campaign,'' notes Klobuchar, who predicts that the regional plan would create ''a much more meaningful primary process.''
With the imprimatur of the secretary of states' bipartisan association and some bipartisan support in Washington, this is the plan with the best prospect of being adopted, either through federal legislation or by the parties themselves.
Action by the parties would probably be preferable, as a federal law could be subject to a court challenge over whether Congress has the constitutional authority to mandate such a system. But there's also a complication in leaving matters up to the parties; because of Republican Party rules, nominating process changes can only be enacted at the quadrennial Republican National Convention.
But either way, the time to act is this year, before a new president is elected and partisan political calculation takes over.
''If it is going to happen, it has got to happen this year,'' Galvin says. It should be a priority for everyone concerned with a better primary process.
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com. 