Should We Talk About The Weather?

I've heard some complaints that Iowa and New Hampshire get the first crack at presidential election headlines, but I'm not sure I see what the problem is. A tiny sliver of a minority of the electorate made up almost entirely of white people get to cut in front of the line and weigh in with orders of magnitude more influence and power than any moral or sociodemographic metric could ever conceivably justify. In the history of American politics, that's less an aberration and more of a time-honored tradition.

I understand the frenzy over the results. The timeline of the presidential election cycle is absurdly long. People were out there officially declaring their candidacies in like, no shit, 2017. And everyone else who hadn't already jumped through the hoop of bullshit that is "forming an exploratory committee" were pretty much already understood to be running. The news machine has been forced to completely make up horse races and momentum swings and BIG DRAMA narratives to manufacture and maintain minimal interest. It's been at least 18 months of pump-priming or kindling-chipping or arsenic-lacing or whatever metaphor you want to use for any process that is slow and tedious and ultimately results in something either anticlimactically prosaic or that everyone immediately regrets.

We've had a lot of breathless headlines over the last several days, mostly in service of the storylines headline editors have been invested in since they made them up in the first place. In all the noise, I almost missed something that is of actual practical importance: holy shit, I actually have to vote soon.

In the old days, consistent with the logic of presidential primary organization, the big giant diverse state where the most people live, in the most disparate and varied ethnographic configurations, had its primary in June, after functionally everyone else and well after the race has been decided. Again, it's nonsensical and indefensible, but that's how tradition works. How else do you explain the persistence of Christmas music?

Some genius somewhere along the way decided that we should move the California primary up to "Super Tuesday," at the same time of all the normals and the plebs in backwaters like Oklahoma and Massachusetts. That sounds OK if your goal is participatory democracy, but it puts me in the awkward position of having to Understand and Choose.

Was the previous primary calendar fair, workable or practical? Obviously not. But I remember in 2004, when I hated John Kerry as a candidate, I didn't have any choice but to vote for him in the primary as everyone else had been effectively eliminated by the time the vote got to us. The general election went about the way I feared, but at least I was unburdened by the indignity of thinking about things in front of other people.

Sure now I get to have a say, but now the free space I had in my head to think too much about Star Wars, I now have to devote to deciding to vote for... I don't know, Warren I guess?

It would probably seem less of a load to carry if I felt more strongly about any one of the contenders. I guess I can take some comfort in the fact that the predicament hasn't descended to depths I'd describe as Kerry-esque.