Via the LAT: Holding New Hampshire’s primary in place
BILL Gardner was at it again, mucking up Democrats’ timetable for picking their presidential nominee by insisting on the date he wanted for New Hampshire’s vote.So one day, frustrated party leaders sent an emissary to the state Capitol to deal with the balky secretary of state. Gardner, however, would not bend. He was adamant about preserving New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary by pushing the contest forward a week, rather than have it share its election day with Vermont.
The result was a lecture that still rings in his ears nearly 25 years later: You’re a young man and probably hope for a bright political future. If you do this, you will never be elected to another office.
The party’s emissary, Nancy Pelosi, was right. She went on to much bigger things (and can’t recall the conversation). Gardner, 58, is still in the same office — and utterly delighted at life’s fortune. And why not? Gardner is probably the most influential figure in national politics you’ve never heard of.
Indeed.
However, isn’t there something wrong with an an entrenched bureaucrat (he’s appointed to a two-year term, in which he is in his 16th, by the state legislature) having this much influence over the presidential nomination system?
Clearly, preserving the primary for NH has become his life’s work:
He is the one and only person in New Hampshire with the power to schedule the state’s presidential primary. It has been first since 1920, making the vote a signal event on the national political calendar — and giving voters of this tiny state an enormous say every four years in deciding who sits in the White House.It has been Gardner’s mission, his obsession, since 1976 to preserve the state’s preeminence, and nothing — not lobbying, not threats, not even the occasional flicker of self-doubt — can dissuade him from doing whatever it takes to make sure New Hampshire’s primary always, always comes first. (By mutual understanding, Iowa holds the first caucuses, eight days beforehand.)
“What’s been established as a tradition is a tradition,” Gardner says with a certitude as plain and simple as the peanut-butter-on-whole-wheat sandwiches he packs in his brown-bag lunch.
Because, of course, “tradition” is the best reason to do things. Further: nothing like obsessed bureaucrats focusing their power on their pet projects.
To be fair, it isn’t like Gardner is the only one holding the levers of control here. The New Hampshire state government thinks that the finger of God came down and wrote in granite that their state has the divine right to being the first primary in the country and the parties are too scared (for reasons I really don’t quite get) to wrest control of the process from them.
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