Radio Free New Hampshire: Green Monsters

By Michael Davidow, Radio Free New Hampshire, InDepth NH

Fenway Park has a big wall in left field that towers over everything. It turns doubles into singles, pop flies into home runs, and home runs into doubles. Batters adjust their swings and managers adjust their line-ups. You might think people would hate this, but no. A blobby green monster named Wally serves as the Red Sox mascot.

Baseball prides itself on quirks. Though their infield diamonds are all the same, every park is otherwise unique. Some have ample foul ground, some have short porches, some have ivy covering the walls. This even filters down to little league. Whenever my son plays somewhere new, I check how far the backstop lies from home plate. He pitches and I like to know how many of his wild ones will bring in a run from third base.

None of this is sensible and maybe baseball should be more like other sports, basketball, soccer, and football, which all have uniform playing areas. You won’t get much traction for that proposition, though. The game itself has evolved like this. People don’t just accept it. They like it.

American politics has long had a big green wall of its own, called the New Hampshire primary. Just like Fenway’s monster, it came from a quirk of history.

We started it for fun and it served a purpose so it stuck. Long shot candidates from Estes Kefauver to Gene McCarthy to Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson realized they could make a splash here with personal effort and not much money. It opened up the electoral process and gave good results. Candidates from both parties began to figure on its effect. Like Boston’s left field wall, it began to alter game plans. And like Boston’s left field wall, people began to like it.

To stress, however: it served a purpose. What had started as a quirk of history turned into serendipity. But just because something exists is no reason to keep supporting it. If something no longer makes sense, then change it; and the Democrats have decided that the New Hampshire primary has to go.

Now nothing could be worse than how the Democrats picked their last candidate, which was in the dark with blankets over their heads. But that had nothing to do with New Hampshire and if you’re going to change something that has worked well in the past, you should have a solid plan to take its place.

One easy alternative would be to switch who comes first on a regular basis, so no favoritism at all is possible. But that won’t work because nobody wants New York or California to ever go first; those states are only available to candidates with huge money, and if there is one thing the Democrats pretend to stand for, it’s the baleful influence of big money in politics. Or maybe you could just have the little states take turns; but we already have enough trouble with the Senate and the Electoral College. Just imagine the progressive outrage when South Dakota and Idaho get their turn in the spotlight.

No, we are stuck playing favorites, the Democrats are doing exactly that, and at least they are open about it. In political speak, we are too white, too old, and too moderate for the modern world. We aren’t trusted to give new candidates a voice. Not sure why, because we always have. And the flip-side: those new candidates aren’t trusted to have the ability to speak to New Hampshirites. Not sure why, because if you are so ensiloed in your own narrative that you can’t appeal to people who are different from you, then you have no business running this county.

But the goal is to open up the process even more to people of color, so the Democrats are pushing their first primaries to places where they have more people of color. Because this is such a good idea, in fact, our leaders of color are now angry with each other, with Hispanics and blacks both wanting more clout.

As has been their bent for a generation now, the Democrats are seeking to engineer the outcome they want from their nominating process. They are not changing the rules out of fairness, nor out of respect for democracy, nor out of faith in our nation. They are changing the rules to best assure a predetermined outcome, which is a steady stream of identity-inflected politicians gaining national prominence. They should just quit this primary business altogether, because at this point, it has outlived its usefulness.

Whether that’s wise is another question, because identity politics runs green too. It’s the politics of envy, pure and simple.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This story was originally published by InDepth NH.