It Makes a Difference to the Sheep

GET YOUR NUTRITIOUS POLITICAL TOAST AT THE TOAST-O-METER. Not much action predicted for next week's "forgotten Tuesday" primaries:

If March 2nd is “Super Tuesday” then February 24th is “Forgotten Tuesday,” as it appears that the candidates have written off the contests in Idaho, Utah and Hawaii.

I am still at a loss as to why Edwards didn't make a push in some of these states to try to wrack up another win prior to Super Tuesday.

According to the NYT, the polls show Kerry in the lead in all three states—and the only way any of the Forgotten Tuesday contests will make any difference is if Kerry loses one.

This illustrates what I see as a problem with our current system of primaries. Taken together the population of Hawaii, Idaho and Utah is some 4,800,000 people (2001 estimates taken from my trusty Encarta Reference Library). That is half a million more people than the population of Iowa and New Hampshire combined! And yet the good denizens of Ogden, Burley, and Kuau will never get the chance to see their potential representatives flipping pancakes, addressing a town meeting, or another of the myriad of small-scale interactions that people in Iowa and New Hampshire enjoyed. Instead, they get sound-bites from a fly-over campaign focused on Super Tuesday’s bigger fish.

I’m not sure how to rectify this situation. If no delegates could be committed until the convention, most candidates would simply ignore all small states. Under the current system, at least Iowa and New Hampshire get to be king for a day.