This weekend Fergus Cullen, a freelance columnist and former chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, wrote an amusing opinion piece for the Des Moines Register. In a manner matching his colorful name, the writer compared first presidential test states Iowa and New Hampshire to high school friends who drifted apart – New Hampshire becoming the stable friend with the orderly life while Iowa dates “a string of spacey girls, and talked about religion a lot.” He postures Iowa Republicans have lost credibility in the primary selection process saying, “It’s hard to talk about real issues when three quarters of the audience wears tinfoil hats.” I’ll come back to the tinfoil hats later, but Cullen’s self-serving defense of his state misses the point.
Who did he say was wearing a funny hat?
First, the influence of the right-wing fringe is not limited to Iowa any more than the influence of vocal less-than-mainstream voters is restricted to the Republican Party. The nominees of both parties have to dance with party activists before being passed on to the national stage. It is just that, these days, the GOP appears a bit more fractured than the Democrats. Cullen oversimplifies the sway the radical factions have in the nomination process with uninformed generalizations to argue the Iowa Caucuses are impacted by these groups more than the New Hampshire Primary is.
Cullen’s main premise is based on two conditions, all candidates must have an equal shot and the voters of these early states must be broadly representative of the party as a whole. He is wrong. Part of the reason the parties have a nominating process is precisely because no state reflects the national whole. Iowans have different concerns than do New Hampshirites. New Yorkers’ perspectives differ from those of South Carolinians. And, so on. Iowa and New Hampshire have long held that allowing these two small states first shot at the candidates provides a balance to the advantage heavily populated states have in the process in general. Iowa and New Hampshire don’t go first because their voters mirror Americans as a group. They go first because the personal, hand-to-hand campaign a candidate must run in these states is different than the TV centric efforts he must run to succeed in the large states.
One shouldn’t promote the Iowa Caucuses and the New Hampshire Primaries because these states will perfectly mimic what will happen in the other 48 states, but because they provide an important and different perspective that would be lost if the large states dominated the process. Just as the first test the high school students Cullen used in his analogy took as freshmen could not have predicted who would be valedictorian, the results of the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primaries are not meant to predict who will be the nominee. It is what they add to the overall process that makes them important.
As for Cullen’s assertion that early contest states must provide every candidate an equal shot at winning the most votes, that too is sophomoric. Each candidate holds certain advantages and disadvantages in every state. The process of having to pass a nomination test in every state vets candidates in a way that takes our inherent differences into consideration and allows American voters to examine the candidates from many different angles. If there were to be a single national primary contest, presidential campaigns would be nothing more than an extension of the mass market oversimplified pap we see during the general election.
Cullen claims that same sex marriage is a major issue for Iowans in 2012 saying since the New Hampshire Legislature approved same-sex marriage and the issue was decided by the courts in Iowa, his state is somehow more mainstream and rational. He also suggests there are more birthers (those who contend President Obama was not born as a US citizen even though there is a mountain of evidence proving he was) in Iowa than elsewhere. Polls indicate Iowans are not overly focused on marriage or wild conspiracy theories any more than are Republicans elsewhere.
As a former state party chair, Cullen knows all too well that party regulars do not always reflect the broader population. If they did, you would see far more people wearing red, white and blue elephant hats to the mall than you do, which brings me to the tinfoil chapeau.
In 2008, I attended a Ron Paul for President event and was seated amidst a group of energetic Paul supporters. While waiting for the candidate to arrive, they had an animated discussion about the U.S. government’s plot and subsequent cover-up of the 9/11 attacks. As Paul took the stage, one of them said he had wished he had worn his foil hat to deflect the FBI’s listening capability, but he was “so psyched” about Paul, he did not care. As a witness to this conversation, I know for a fact some of Paul’s support came from tinfoil wearing supporters. But, it would be a stretch for me to say that Paul was marginalized because these folks existed. It is similarly unfair and shortsighted of Cullen to make the same broad strokes of Iowa Caucus goers without considering the role each state plays in the overall process.
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Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com
This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.
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