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April 21, 2006
Driving the lane
Here’s a novelty: A U.S. senator from Oregon showed up at the Monitor yesterday, and (apparently) he wasn’t running for president.
He was Democrat Ron Wyden, a one-time college basketball player. He had come, he said, because to score you have to drive the lane, and in national politics New Hampshire is the lane.
Wyden did not give us the Shermanesque defense of the New Hampshire primary that we crave from all Democrats these days. But then neither did John Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential candidate, who was also in Concord yesterday.
We’re stressing here about Democratic Party efforts to front-load the nomination process even more by jamming a couple of state caucuses between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary in 2008.
This is being done in the name of diversity, and it’s hard for Democratic contenders to speak against diversity. So they whisper sweet nothings about New Hampshire’s sacred role in the process but won’t criticize efforts to undermine it.
Still, they honor us by their presence.
Wyden’s over-arching mission, he said, was to say that Democrats won’t get anywhere next fall or in 2008 merely by trashing President Bush. The party needs a positive message, he said.
His hope is to wrest tax reform from the Republicans, who have fallen silent on the issue. The main features of Wyden’s plan are to reduce the brackets to three (15, 25 and 35 percent), to treat all income the same and to simplify filing. His appeal is to the middle class, a phrase he utters every other sentence and a group he defines broadly. If you’ve seen your income stagnate in recent years while more affluent people around you benefited from Bush’s tax cuts, Wyden wants your ear. And did he mention that his tax-reform idea is much like Ronald Reagan's of 20 years ago?
It’s hard to tell from Concord whether Wyden has any support even within his own party for his proposal. But his overall idea seems right. If, in the mid-term elections, Democrats want to take advantage of Bush’s drooping popularity, they need to arm themselves with policy alternatives that appeal to voters.
As for our parochial interests, it would be nice if Democrats realized that they can’t, on the one hand, praise New Hampshire’s record as a place where all presidential candidates get a fair shake while, on the other, seeking to undermine the state’s role in the nomination process. More early caucuses won’t get Democrats a better nominee, but wedging them in will diminish the value of the New Hampshire primary in testing how well candidates for president connect with real voters.
Posted by Mike Pride at April 21, 2006 09:52 AM