A Dumb Way to Pick a President

Think the 2008 race for Democratic Party presidential nominee was nasty? Blame Iowa and New Hampshire. And just because the race continues, don’t assume your primary vote will decide anything important. It won’t. Iowa and New Hampshire get the blame for that too.

You see those two states elected the next president. Well, not exactly. But they did limit the field of candidates, diminishing the choices available to voters in other states.

As any good secretary knows, the one who limits the options has more power than the final decision maker. By deciding who won’t be president, Iowa and New Hampshire did a disservice to the rest of the country. Their limiting processes produced candidates whose policy views are almost identical. Mainly differences are in nuance. That assures a contest that is personality rather than policy driven. Almost by definition such contests are petty and nasty.

If we are lucky, this will be the last year anyone more than a hundred miles from Dubuque gives a hoot about the Iowa Caucus. Ditto the New Hampshire Primary.

Of course, there are those who believe that candidates mature in the unique atmospheres of Iowa and New Hampshire. They hone their messages. They are forced to meet and learn to connect with small groups.

True, Iowa and New Hampshire look more like the idyllic image of 1950s America than does the country as a whole. Those states are less diverse, better educated and more financially secure than the nation in general. That is partly why those states’ early elimination of presidential candidates doesn’t produce better presidents for the people of Indiana, Texas, Kansas or North Carolina.

And as for that malarkey about Iowa being a finishing school for candidates, that’s just a fancy way of saying amateurs get to spend time practicing before the big show. The nation’s problems are urgent and diverse. Being a good president involves more than just getting your speech right. It also requires learning about the diverse problems we face so that together we can build better communities, a better nation and a better world. It’s also about developing a mandate by speaking forthrightly on issues about which honorable people strongly disagree. Is that too much to ask of one who aspires to be president of the whole United States?

Such candidates aren’t made more numerous by the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire Primary. The uniqueness of their vetting processes is that those states protect the status quo by steering the conversation to the center. They produce candidates who offend the fewest number of voters, and who accordingly will have no mandate to tackle any major problem. Their processes produce candidates who are consistently average.

America’s problems aren’t 1950s average. Our problems reflect our national diversity. Many of those problems involve balancing the interest of one region against the detriment of another. A presidential election process that permits one or two states to narrow the choices available to 48 other states is a disgrace.

We should shorten this process so that candidates can either win and get on with governing, or lose and go back to work. A national primary system would provide the greatest opportunity for the many diverse and competing interest to equally impact the election. In the alternative, there could be regional primaries where at least two regions voted at a time.

Anything else will continue us down a road toward more and more mediocre presidents who leave office without having tackled the nation’s ever-increasing and ever-more complex problems. Worse, we’ll move closer to having elections that are mere entertainment where the biggest “star” wins.