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The idea was for the Mountain West to get some attention from presidential candidates by holding a regional primary in March.
If it had worked, this would be an exciting time in Colorado, the most populated of the mountain states.
After having been advised as to how certain accents
grate on montane ears, George Bush the Younger would be
trying to minimize the drawl he affects in Texas as he
explained compassionate conservatism
and how it
could mean even more federal prison payrolls for deserving
states.
John McCain would be pointing to his presidential role model, Theodore Roosevelt, as he tried to fabricate a connection between the old progressive Republicanism (protection and conservation of public natural resources) and modern Republican policy (give it to multi-national corporations, and starve the federal agencies that are responsible for managing what's left).
Al Gore and Bill Bradley would be arguing about who was more pro-choice, anti-tobacco, pro-diversity and anti-gun.
We would be courted in the morning, addressed in the afternoon, advertised to in the evening, and polled around the clock. An army of correspondents from the national newspapers, newsweeklies and TV networks would be scouring the state for stereotypical Coloradans to play their roles during interviews.
What's a stereotypical Coloradan? Good question. I
know all about those Iowa farmers who emerge every leap
year, as well as the flinty tax-hating Live free or
die
Granite Staters and the smooth-talking Southerners
who haven't approved of any federal law since the Fugitive
Slave Recovery Act of 1850.
But a Coloradan? That's one reason I liked the idea of an early Western primary, so that the big-time media could define us and we'd know what we are.
Without such definitive statements, I get confused. A couple of months ago, Brill's Content (a magazine that critiques the media) published an article about the media frenzy surrounding the JonBenet Ramsey murder.
It began by describing Boulder as a mountain
hamlet.
Boulder isn't a mountain
anything --
it's part of the Front Range piedmont sprawl zone. And
with about 100,000 people, it's not what most people would
call a hamlet, either.
Back in 1994, I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal,
and identified as from the hamlet
of Salida. Salida
is the largest city for at least 50 miles in any direction.
That's something that neither Washington, D.C., nor San
Francisco can claim.
(Washington, population 523,000, is only 35 miles from Baltimore, which has 646,000 residents; San Francisco, 746,000, sits only 44 miles from San Jose and its 861,000 people.)
And yet I have never seen Washington or San Francisco
described as a hamlet.
With some national campaign
coverage here, we might learn what's a hamlet and what
isn't: The McCain entourage increased its security as it
entered the forbidding hamlet of Colorado Springs, where
the candidate had just been tarred as an 'egg-sucking
tax-and-spend bleeding-heart liberal' for his failure to
support the death penalty for women who miscarry after
riding horseback.
But the Colorado primary on Friday is a victim of bad timing, stuck between the New York and California primaries today, and Super Tuesday in the South next week. There aren't enough delegate votes here to be worth the trouble.
Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt tried to solve that by proposing a Western States regional primary. Our states could agree on a date, thus presenting enough delegates at stake to attract campaigns. Then the candidates would spend some time stumping in the region. Some of our specific regional concerns -- water, public lands, transportation and communication -- might get on the national agenda.
But Leavitt's concept was never fully implemented, and it wouldn't have mattered anyway. As recently as 1992, the Mountain West had two political parties. But since then, the largest segment of our population growth has come from migrant Republicans who have found that California is no longer white enough to suit them.
This invasion has converted the Mountain West into the most reliably Republican zone on the continent. There's no point in Democrats campaigning here, and the Republican nominee will get our electoral votes whether he campaigns here or not.
Maybe that's for the best. Granted, it would have been
exciting to see the campaigns in person. But on the other
hand, I'm already sick of the word hamlet,
and we'd
have seen a lot more of it if our primary mattered.
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