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Arkansas 2008 primary is second 'Super Tuesday' for state Monday, Jan 21, 2008 By Jason Wiest Arkansas News Bureau LITTLE ROCK - Although Feb. 5 will be the earliest Arkansans have gone to the polls to choose oval office nominees, this year's presidential primary won't be the first held in Arkansas under the label "Super Tuesday." Twenty years ago, Arkansas and 15 other Southern states moved their primaries to March 8 in an attempt to add regional muscle to deciding the nominees, particularly the Democrats. This year, Arkansas' motivation for hastening its presidential primaries from mid-May, when primary elections for state and local offices will be held as usual, is generally the same as in 1988: Greater influence in presidential politics. "It all kind of got started in '76 when (Jimmy) Carter figured out that you run in those early primaries and you create such a momentum that the election's over by the time you get to those later states," said Tom Wynne, a Fordyce lawyer and former state prosecutor who was a high-ranking officer in the Democratic Party of Arkansas in the early 1980s. "It was trying to make Arkansas relevant in the presidential campaign," said former Congressman Asa Hutchinson, the Sebastian County Republican chairman at the time. "Even at that point, even in March of that year of the nomination, it had pretty well been decided." At least for Republicans, who saw the first George Bush as heir apparent after having served eight years as Ronald Reagan's vice president. On the other hand, Super Tuesday was supposed to be big for Southern Democrats desperate for a more right-leaning challenger to Bush than former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, whom they compared unfavorably to 1984 Democratic standard-bearer Walter Mondale. The unabashedly liberal Mondale won only his home state of Michigan and the District of Columbia, handing Reagan the most lopsided victory in the history of American presidential politics. Four years later, Southern Democrats devised the Super Tuesday regional primary to steer the party more toward the center and anoint a more moderate alternative to Dukakis who would fare better against Bush. "A lot of the Southern states banded together to have a bigger say after the debacle in '84," Wynne said. The plan backfired, leaving the Democrats more, not less, fractured after Super Tuesday. U.S. Sen. Gary Hart and Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. dropped out of the race early - Hart faced allegations of an extramarital affair and Biden was accused of plagiarizing part of a campaign speech. On Super Tuesday, Tennessee Sen. Al Gore won only his home state, Arkansas, Kentucky, North Carolina and Oklahoma. Dukakis picked up wins in Florida and Texas. Jesse Jackson won Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia with the support of black voters, who made up a large portion of the South's Democratic primary base. Dukakis eventually won the Democratic nomination. Bush won the general election with 53.4 percent of the vote. "This year, it's not so much to get a moderate or a leftist or a rightist," Wynne said. "It's more to have a say-so whoever we elect." That's what state lawmakers had in mind when they adopted legislation in 2005 to move up this year's presidential primary. But the greater voice they hoped to achieve may be drowned out by voters in California, Illinois, New York and other bigger states that also moved their primaries to Feb. 5. Still, party officials from 20 years ago said the move, then and now, was worth the effort. But some said if they had it their way, the primaries would be scheduled later in the year, nearer the general election, in Arkansas and across the country. For Wynne, later primaries would be nostalgic. "I liked the summer campaigns when I was a boy," he recalled. "You'd see the candidates campaigning in the heat with their sleeves rolled up." Once the primaries were over, the general election campaigns lasted only two or three months, he said. "I think that having a long electoral process, it keeps the country kind of divided," said lawyer David Matthews of Lowell, who was a key Arkansas voice in primary states on behalf of Bill Clinton during Clinton's 1990s campaigns. "These people have been campaigning for a year. They have had an incentive to be at odds with the current administration for the past year or more, and we're talking about a whole bunch of U.S. Senators that run." Matthews, a former state House member, sponsored legislation in 1987 that would have moved Arkansas primaries after 1988 to August instead of back to the usual May date. The measure failed. Hutchinson, who had no primary opponent in his unsuccessful race for governor in 2006, said it does not matter when the presidential primaries are held. The election process will still be long, he said, because of the pressure of today's 24-hour news cycle and candidate's fundraising activities. Longtime GOP activist Charles Mizander of Benton said he favors having most of the states' primaries on the same day. "Practically, I kind of think it might be OK to have (a few primaries) early to kind of let people get a feeling of the sentiments around the country, and then just have the rest of them on one date," Mizander said. "No candidate can campaign in 50 states" because of physical and financial impracticalities, he said. Some political observers doubt the major candidates will campaign or even advertise in Arkansas this year, despite the state holding its earliest ever presidential primaries, because Arkansas is lumped in with all the other states holding Feb. 5 primaries. "We'll never have the impact we'd like to have unless we somehow are able to move it to Dec. 1," Wynne said, noting that at least the Democratic Party has all but forbidden states from holding primaries so early. |
