I think I am beginning to get the "willies". The "willies" about this great mass of primaries that we have foisted upon ourselves. From the relative orderliness of Iowa and New Hampshire and a continuing plodding of primaries thereafter, we now have Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada and South Carolina pulling Santa's sleigh over the holidays (and Michigan and Florida, too - even if they don't get to count.)
And then the tsunami hits with Super Duper Tuesday a few weeks later and its all over. Thanks for playing folks, it's time to go home. In our quest to be more "inclusive" and "representative" of the nation (whatever the hell that means), I think we may front loaded ourselves into an oblivion in which the only thing that WILL matter is cold night in a rural Midwestern state.
Can we just go back to a bunch of white farmers in Iowa and cranky New Englanders in the Granite State getting a first chew and then the rest of us having time to muddle it all over? We're electing the President here, not student council.
<More on why I trust a bunch of white farmers in the Midwest after the flip>
This Mess O' Primaries is quickly starting to take the shape of what I call the California Disease. The California Disease is this afflication we have out here in the West where we confuse pulling a lever in a voting booth with democracy. They pull a lever in Russia, too, but I doubt most anyone would recognize today's Putin-land as resembling anything we'd consider a modern democracy.
Pulling levers is fun, like pushing buttons or swinging a Wii controller around. In California, we LOVE to pull levers. We love it so much we aren't happy doing it every four years for important things and every two for semi-important things. We love it so much we have spawned so many initiatives and propositions all the time that we need to pull levers at least once a year every November and sometimes more in June. We get to make massive decisions about statewide policy and budget priorities based on a one paragraph summary in a voter's guide and a slew of television ads. In other words, money and access to the party Machine decide for us.
And that, right there, is the problem. There are so many of us and we are spread so far around, that the only thing we have the opportunity to base our decisions on IS a slew of televions ads and that one paragraph summary. The voters on American Idol are better informed than we are. This might be fine if we could keep this disease confined to the Golden State. Unfortunately, it appears to have spread to the rest of the country. It has given us a truncated, race to first (and the bottom) primary schedule where the mass of voters is so large, the scale so immense, that the only thing that matters is money for ads and access to the Machine. That, and those caucuses in Iowa.
With the primary schedule so compressed, little or medium "'Mo" from Iowa and New Hampshire turns to Super Duper 'Mo. And thus do we come to those white farmers in the Midwest and their cute little caucuses. And thank God for those caucuses. Its about the only thing keeping me sane. Right there in the middle of all this mess there is at least one piece that still resembles a democracy. I came from New England before I landed in La-La Land. We had this cute little thing of our own called Town Meeting. If you lived in a small enough town, once or twice a year, everyone in town gets together at the local hall or high school to yell at each other about the town budget, zoning codes and anything else. You can submit items to be considered by Town Meeting. You can make motions and amendments and generally act like members of Parliament but with funnier accents and puffier down jackets.
Most importantly, you deliberate. Deliberate comes to us from Middle English by way of the Latin, deliberatus, of liberare. The root being "libra", or scales. In the deliberations of Town Meeting (and Iowa's caucus night) yelling, cajoling and generally getting in each other's faces forces us to deliberate, to weigh carefully. You can't act too batshit crazy when the guy you want to act batshit crazy against is standing in front of you. And I'm glad for it - for even in the middle of Mess O' Primaries, at least one group of people will be taking some time and care with the whole process and treating democracy as, you know, IMPORTANT, regardless of whether their Midwesterness or whiteness or farmerness is, or is not, "representative" of the whole.
So to all you hardy Iowans skipping the Orange Bowl to trundle in the cold to your local community center and munch on stale doughnuts and bad coffee, I salute you. And please, choose wisely and choose well.