Kerry's New Hampshire Win Amounts to Almost No Delegates
Senator John Kerry built on his apparent victory in the Iowa caucuses with a win in the New Hampshire primary. A lot of nonsense has been written about these two small states and the results. The fact is it's too early to read anything into any of this, and while Senator Kerry deserves the praise he has received for turning his campaign around, this ugly process won't be over for another month at least.
The American press has worked itself up into a frenzy over the events of the last two weeks, before most Americans even knew it was an election year. Iowa and New Hampshire account for 1.5% of the delegates a Democrat will need to win the nomination. Missouri, which goes to the polls on Tuesday, will select more. And thanks to the Democrats' proportional representation rules, that very small fragment got sliced even finer.
The pundits like to talk about momentum, finances, organization, staying on message, but the nominee will not need any of these if there is a majority of delegates ready to vote for him in Boston this summer. Those factors are indicators of who will win the delegate count, but they cannot be used as proxies this early in the race. The sample is too small.
Far more important than Iowa and New Hampshire are the races this week and on February 17 (Wisconsin could be Dean's turning point if he doesn't melt down entirely between now and then). Then, March 2 is Super Tuesday (a really bad name designed to make selecting the most powerful man in the world sound like a sporting event), where almost 40% of the delegates will be selected, and where New York and California will finally get their say. And don't forget the elected and party officials who get to be delegates (over 800 of these superdelegates will be in Boston); they will stampede to make sure there is no brokered convention.
Is this anyway for the world's oldest political party (the Democrats claim descent from Tom Jefferson's Democratic Republicans) to select its standard bearer? Of course not. The activist vote leans far to the left (and the GOP's far too the right). The farmers of Iowa and the flinty Yankees of New Hampshire are fine and decent folk, but they have no business determining for New York, Texas and California that Congressman Gephardt won't be a choice. Let the Congressional Democrats and governors select a handful of candidates, let the rank and file vote in primaries held on the same day, and let the convention break any ties.
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