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The DNC Change Commission held its final in-person meeting today in Washington DC. The Commission discussed draft findings and recommendations regarding the timing of primaries/caucuses, the role of super delegates, and caucus issues. The Commission will have a conference call prior to December 31, 2009 to complete its report. The report will then go to the DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC) which will consider the Commission's recommendations when the RBC drafts the 2012 Delegate Selection rules.
Timing
As to timing, the discussion was relatively brief and consistent with prior discussions - Iowa/NH/SC/Nevada can go after Feb. 1, every other state goes after March 1, the rules should encourage regional clusters by offering incentives such as bonus delegates, the RBC will address enforcement procedures and sanctions, and the DNC will try to coordinate timing with the RNC rules committee. The RNC coordination process is ongoing.
I'm down with that. The '08 primary came dangerously close to being an '07 one, after all.
This will surprise some of you, since it goes against the grain of many clear-thinking and prescient voices on this site, as well as some of our Democratic candidates and officeholders. Here goes (deep breath):
I support the President's policy in Afghanistan.
Based on a number of conversations, including a key one with a veteran who has served there, I am pessimistic of its chances of success.
An RNC panel headed by party chairman Michael Steele invited the campaigns to share their views as it considers numerous possible changes to the process the party will use to nominate a candidate to challenge President Barack Obama in 2012.
Mike DuHaime, the 2008 campaign manager for former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, told the panel that the three early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina should continue to hold contests early in the process, but not necessarily as the first three contests.
"I believe there needs to be greater decision-making authority given to states beyond the early states," said DuHaime, referring to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. "If you win two out of three states, those have been our nominees. With that, 47 other states don't have the same say."
This, after Clinton and Obama battled it out in 2008 all over the map.
Can we just be honest and cut to the chase as to what this is really all about?
A noun, a verb, and 9/11 couldn't even get two thousand more votes in New Hampshire than Ron Paul. And despite their spin, it wasn't for lack of trying.
So, unless Haley Barbour counts, we have our first guest in the New Hampshire Primary dance:
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty will keynote a Republican fund-raiser in Concord next month, NHPoliticalReport.com has confirmed.
Pawlenty is the featured guest of the Republican Senate Majority Committee PAC on Wednesday, Dec. 16.
There's an awful lot of bad associated with "T-Paw," particularly the craven way he has adopted an anti-gay hater stance to curry favor with the hard-right.
But leaving aside the damage he's done to Minnesota, I find the classy way he talks about his marriage to be most telling of all.Bizarro-quote #1:
I have a wife who genuinely loves to fish. I mean, she will take the lead and ask me to go out fishing, and joyfully comes here. She loves football, she'll go to hockey games and, I jokingly say, "Now, if I could only get her to have sex with me."
Bizarro quote #2 (and yes, I get the movie reference; that doesn't make it any better for me):
"Thank you, Lord, for my red-hot, smokin' wife,"
That last one was just recently quipped in Iowa, so there's every reason to expect we Primary Staters can maybe learn more about Pawlenty's issues with women at this next event.
Not to be outdone by Facebook Governor Sarah Palin's "death panel," FOXNews Governor Mike Huckabee wades into the slime:
"[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don't have as long to live might want to consider just taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them," said Huckabee. "Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not.
I sure hope someone will call him on this contemptuous lie when he comes a knockin' in New Hampshire for the primary.
UPDATE: So, the question that remains now is: will the new face of the NHGOP, such as who were at CSP's town hall, go with Facebook Gov. Palin, or FOXNews Gov. Huckabee? Or will Mittens have to make a play for them as well?
During a campaign trip in October to New Hampshire, [Sarah Palin] balked at sharing the stage with former congressman Jeb Bradley because they differed on abortion and drilling in the Arctic wilderness," the authors wrote. "That same day, she was reluctant to join Bradley and Senator John Sununu for conversation aboard her campaign bus and had to be coaxed out of the back of the bus to talk to them, according to a McCain adviser."
Something tells me those two will line up with Romney anyhow. But still, nice to know how she treats members of her own party from the Granite State.
Pindell confirms from Haley Barbour today the story about Sununu Senior making a point of having Barbour come up here for a fundraiser because he's not running for president.
Of course Sununu Senior pretends climate change doesn't exist either.
He's so running. Run, Haley, run! Since the other likely Bible Belt Republican Governor POTUS candidate has been missing since Naked Hiking Day, we need you now more than ever.
Mittens on Winnipesauke, alack, still destined to be, officially, a vacation home only:
"No, my residence is still in Massachusetts. That is my home. That's where I vote. And I'm going to continue to be a Massachusetts resident - I can't tell you how many years that's the case - but for the indefinite future," Romney told "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace.
Deep Thought: How on earth will the non-fringe wing of the NHGOP find its way back to the fore and to winning elections again when the next primary means a steady diet of Sanfords, Barbours, Perrys, Huckleberrys, and Palins coming to town? And how will Mittens navigate those choppy waters?
Remember when all the polls were wrong on the eve of the NH-Primary?
(I was so snookered by them that I voted for Edwards (my man Dodd having just dropped out) thinking that Obama would win and carry the nomination quickly, and that Edwards surviving for a couple more states would help pull health care and a few other things in the debate to the left for Obama.)
And remember how we were accused of all sorts of whackadoodle-ism, from vote fraud to - my least favorite - charges of racism along the lines of the Bradley effect?
Well, a report (warning: truly massive .pdf) came out today from the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), pointing to an aggregate of small factors that helped create the worst polling fiasco in many years.
But it's a point from Pollster's Mark Blumenthal's summary of the report I want to highlight, since the racist NH Dems storyline has been sticking in my craw since two Januarys ago:
The report also produces evidence that rules out a number of prominent theories, among them the so-called "Bradley Effect." The authors claim they saw "no evidence that white respondents over-represented their support for Obama," and thus, no evidence of "latent racism" benefiting Clinton. Fair enough, but they do report evidence of a "social desirability effect" that led respondents to report "significantly greater" support for Obama "when when the interviewer is black than when he or she is white" (although Obama still led by smaller margins among when interviewers were white -- see pp 55-59 of the pdf report).
The national Democratic Party's new Change Commission will not try to end New Hampshire's leadoff role in picking the party's presidential nominees, the Granite State's lone member of the panel said today.
Ned Helms of Concord said he was assured by President Barack Obama confidante and commission organizer Jeff Berman last Friday the 37-member panel will not try to de-emphasize the New Hampshire primary or strip the state of its traditional first-in-the-nation status in the primary-caucus calendar. Helms said Berman told him Iowa's leadoff caucus is safe, too.
...Helms said that instead of tinkering with the order of early caucuses and primaries, the commission members will try to move the entire caucus-primary process back so that no caucus or primary can be held prior to Feb. 1, 2012.
I'm liking that February date. and although our last primary busted two of the biggest complaints heard about us - that we are a rubber stamp of Iowa and that we keep other states from participating - I'm sure heads across a broad spectrum of blogworld will promptly explode upon hearing this news.
This revelation Ambinder caught hold of from an "RNC rules maven" is disturbing, to say the least:
Republican rules for the first time give the members of the Republican National Committee, by a 2/3 vote, the option of adopting a mandatory 2012 state primary election calendar.
States whose legislatures, which may be controlled by Democrats, refuse to schedule a primary that complies with RNC rules face a draconian choice.
Either their party gives up its presidential primary and instead holds (and pays for) a presidential preference caucus -- or the state suffers a loss of 1/2 of its delegates to the 2012 Convention.
Many party leaders, who, for ideological or personal reasons, prefer a low-participation caucus rather than a higher-participation primary, see this Rule as a great opportunity to transform the party. (It would become more conservative.)
I'd dismiss this if the particulars on the ground weren't so apt for those words. Think about it - the RNC chair race is dominated by southerners, and the New Hampshire Primary this time around resurrected a candidate, John McCain, that was widely unappealing to the southern base, at least before Palin entered the picture. I would not at all be surprised if the southern GOPers were blaming '08 on Granite State Republicans who they see as not representative of the hard-right national core.
And then there's the whole disenfranchising aspect of the plan, which just fits perfectly into what we've come to see from the national elephants.
I'm no expert on what Fergus worked out for 2012, and/or whether that negates any of this danger for our state that Ambinder's post implies. Those who are, please fill me in.
p.s. And didn't the NHGOP delegates have to endure losing half their voice this time around too, IIRC?
It's been one whole year since our day in the sun, and Hillary's dramatic victory. But maybe, after all, we should have paid more attention to our Granite State Delphic oracle, Dixville Notch?
Here's the Yes We Can "concession" speech that spawned one of the biggest viral vids of the entire cycle:
What are your memories from primary day? I'll never forget saying the word "Democrat" a number of times on Faux News while behind me some Ron Paul guy dressed up in revolutionary war clothes was screaming to voters.
There's only six days left (including today) until the new year, and not a single Republican presidential hopeful has made a Primary-2012 visit to the Granite State. I still think Mittens will be first, though I'm guessing the lake house is less appealing to him in wintah. But c'mon, waiting until sometime in 2009?
And I guess Iowa is good enough for Bobby Jindal and Mike Huckabee, but we're not. And we've got plenty of snow for the First Dood.
I remember reading somewhere a couple weeks ago that Bobby Jindal would be coming to Iowa in post-election November.
So now that we've wrapped up this one, let the fun begin: Who will be the first presidentially puffed-up elephant to visit the First-in-the-Nation primary state?
(And who, exactly, will be here to greet him or her?)
Take the poll, give us your thoughts in the comments.
I've asked his before off the cuff, but I think it deserves wider discussion.
Because I believe this should be the first question on the minds of every undecided voter in the Granite State.
Three of the four nominees for high executive office campaigned vigorously in our state for months and months, going to house parties, town halls, meeting voters person to person, answering questions at length on specific policy points.
How would Sarah Palin have fared in such an environment, when she can barely handle the very few, softball media opportunities the McCain campaign allows her to have?
Watch these and then - in all seriousness - imagine what her time in the First in the Nation Primary would have been like. Because based on what little we've been allowed to see, I think she would have been laughed right out of our state.
(And in a poll out just yesterday, 51% of Granite Staters say she is not qualified to be president if need be.)
In December 2006, when US Senator Barack Obama was making his first appearance in New Hampshire to sold out crowds in Portsmouth...
When Hillary Clinton had already hired two top campaign people from our state...
When John McCain, Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Bill Richardson, John Edwards, and a host of other heavyweights were converging on our state and preparing or launching their runs...
Sarah Palin was a week or two into her new job as Governor of Alaska, and hadn't yet become pregnant with her fifth child.
When we were kicking the tires and attending town halls and house parties and asking direct questions and sizing them all up on the most important issues of the day, Sarah Palin hadn't "really focused much on the war in Iraq."
Every Granite Stater should ask themselves this: if Palin had entered the presidential race and campaigned in New Hampshire at the same time as Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden, and the rest, how would she have fared here? Honestly?
I think the answer to that is not a pretty one, and it underscores just how reckless John McCain's judgment is.
p.s. - Perhaps the funniest (or scariest) one - this blog is older than Sarah Palin's experience in high office.
When are the New Hampshire media outlets going to wake up and notice that we all got played by John McCain's empty words about our primary?
We have known for a little while now that, due to the early date of our primary, the John McCain led Republican party is punishing New Hampshire by not recognizing half of our GOP delegates. This precedent is an ominous one for our First in the Nation status.
But all it took was 30 seconds of a YouTube search to find these clips of McCain making promises he had no intention of keeping:
"They keep moving the dates up, they keep moving the dates further and further up, and it obviously encroaches, or endangers, the state of New Hampshire. Now, I will promise you, I will do everything in my power - and I say this because of my reverence for the system - everything in my power to make sure that New Hampshire maintains its First in the Nation status."
- John McCain, Franklin, NH, March 23, 2007
"As you know, every state is literally moving their primary date up, up, up... We must preserve New Hampshire's First in the Nation status for the good of the nation. For the good of the nation, not necessarily just because of the good of the state of New Hampshire.
- John McCain, Plymouth, NH, March 26, 2007
"The state of New Hampshire, as usual, is in danger of losing its First in the Nation status. I want to promise you that I will do everything in my power to make sure that that status is maintained. New Hampshire deserves it."
- John McCain, Hopkinton, NH, October 14, 2007
The man's word is not bond. He got what he wanted out of us, and now he's not recognizing half of NH's GOP delegates.
Every voter in this state should bring this to bear in the voting booth come November.
