Don't tread on N.H.
WASHINGTON
ONE OF THE most dangerous elements in the Democratic Party -- dangerous, that is, to the party's alleged interest in winning elections -- is about to assert itself on the subject of the New Hampshire primary.
It's been 20 years since the process freaks stood up against those who prefer electoral victory, but perhaps memories of the 1990s have dulled enough so that Democrats can go back to worrying more about political science theory and mathematical concepts of diversity than electing presidents.
The latest looming mess regarding the next nominating season is the appointment of a commission to recommend ways of increasing geographic and ethnic diversity in the early voting events that since 1976 have been built around the precinct caucuses in Iowa and the primary in New Hampshire.
The big question is whether the commission at work on the issue will recommend by Dec. 10 that another couple of states be squeezed into what since 1984 has been an eight-day period between Iowa and the Granite State or whether the new states would be put on the calendar for the week following New Hampshire. The addition of contests ahead of New Hampshire would forever change the character of the primary and possibly diminish its importance.
According to one of the party commission's cochairmen, Representative David Price of North Carolina, the balancing task ahead involves weighing the traditional advantage of decades of grassroots politics in the first two states against the presumed need for more ''diversity" in the early contests when the field of candidates has narrowed to two or three.
New Hampshire has a law giving its secretary of state the power to set whatever primary date he determines is necessary to preserve its celebrated first-in-the-nation status. William Gardner has indicated that any more states immediately in front of his own are likely to trigger action on his part.
In my judgment, that makes the New Hampshire primary safe. The commission, however, would benefit from understanding that leaving it alone is also wise.
That was not my view during the last serious dust-up, before the 1984 season, when the political task was adjusting to the newfound prominence of the Iowa caucuses after Jimmy Carter's discovery of their utility in launching his 1976 campaign. The New Hampshire primary did not suffer at all (as Gary Hart famously proved) from its new position eight days after Iowa, and it has not suffered in any cycle since then. In the chaos of the early voting days, eight days turns out to be an eternity.
New Hampshire also did not suffer with the addition of several voting events just a week after it in 2004. There was still time for someone to knock John Kerry off his Iowa-New Hampshire pedestal, and if John Edwards had inched ahead of Wesley Clark in New Hampshire instead of coming in just behind him, he would have had a decent shot in Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arizona.
The ''hawk" in the current dispute is Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, who led a rear guard action in 2004. He has no chance to win a spot for his home state -- a crucial battleground for the Democrats -- before New Hampshire, but he is agitating for the placement of two states with significant African-American and Latino populations (South Carolina and Arizona or New Mexico). His arguments are the traditional ones -- the allegedly nonrepresentative nature of the first two states and the increased likelihood of more than one candidate winning at least one early contest before the crush of major states vote in early March.
Those arguments have always been interesting theoretically, but they ignore the one advantage of the New Hampshire primary: Everyone can vote, and most everyone does. The overriding benefit of the primary is that it rewards broader appeals that test messages likely to be heard in the general election months down the road. In recent seasons, those messages have been significantly amplified by heavy television buys in the local and Boston markets, but never to the exclusion of hard work on the ground.
In addition, New Hampshire has often forced candidates from nearby states to work their tails off for support, much more so than traditionally friendlier Iowa. In 2004, Howard Dean wasn't helped by New England roots, and John Kerry had to suspend his efforts there and go on to win in Iowa before New Hampshire was ready to support him.
Everybody can join an argument about what system would be ideal in a noisy democracy, but the latest fight about New Hampshire (the only red state to turn blue last time) ignores the continuing truth about its primary: It works and should be left alone.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com. 
