Spin control: Primary concern not an easily solved one

In a variation of political chicken, the head of the Washington Republicans decided to throw down last week with his Democratic counterpart over the state presidential primary.

We’ll award half our presidential delegates based on the primary results, GOP chairman Luke Esser said, if the Democrats will do the same. In an attempt to have their cake and eat it, too, the parties could then award the other half based on the caucus results.

This double-dog-dare-ya challenge was interesting on several levels.

First, neither state party has ever been particularly wild about presidential primaries. Both fought the concept for years, and after voters essentially forced it on the Legislature, neither has embraced the primaries with open arms.

It’s true that the Democrats’ antipathy has been more consistent. They’ve never used the primary to pick delegates in Washington. Republicans allocated a third of their delegates based on primary results in 2000, half their delegates in 1996, and all their delegates in 1992, although they did have a caveat that they weren’t giving squat to the two bizarro candidates on the ballot – David Duke and Stephen Michael.

No one used it to pick delegates in 2004, because the primary was canceled as a colossal waste of money that year.

Second, the GOP might understandably be hazy on the Democratic rules, but the Democrats can’t use the primary to allocate half their candidates.

State Chairman Dwight Pelz said the Democratic National Committee says it’s all or nothing. Use the primary for delegate selection, or use the caucuses; you can’t use both. On Saturday the state Central Committee voted to hold caucuses on Feb. 9.

Finally, the method of delegate selection doesn’t seem to be as crucial right now as the timing. State law sets the presidential primary in May, unless it is moved by a group that includes state and party officials. Everyone concedes May is way late, but Democrats and Republicans haven’t yet agreed on whether to move it to Feb. 5, when about half the other states in the country will hold their primaries, or Feb. 12, which has a prospect of picking up interest from the candidates who survive the previous week, or some time in March, which is currently a fairly open month.

Well, it sounded true

Remember all that pundit chatter about “NASCAR Dads” and “Security Moms” during the 2004 presidential election?

The former were supposedly conservative fathers that the Democrats needed to lure away from George Bush to have a shot at capturing marginally red states. The latter were mothers who may have been moderate to liberal at one point, but were now more likely to support Bush because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Hundreds of column inches of newsprint, and a fair amount of talking-head time on cable news networks, were spent discussing how candidates were courting those two key groups. Every time a candidate showed up at a sporting event or a Wal-Mart, somebody would be yammering about NASCAR Dads. Whenever they worked the minivans waiting outside of grade school or did an afternoon chat at Starbucks, somebody would hold forth on Security Moms.

Turns out, they don’t exist. Never did.

So say a couple of political science researchers who studied voting patterns and demographics. As a group, mothers were much more interested in social welfare issues than national security, said Steven Greene of North Carolina State University and Laurel Elder of Hartwick College. Fathers don’t vote any differently than men without children, they added in a study published recently in Social Science Quarterly.

“It is disturbing that images and voter categories that have no basis in empirical reality would be perpetuated,” Greene said.

Yeah, like talking heads who get paid to bloviate on cable channels care about empirical reality.

Where’ve we heard that one?

Council Connection, that scintillating Cable Channel 5 production, taped its latest episode Thursday night with Councilman Al French in the host’s chair.

For those who don’t wait breathlessly for each month’s installment, it’s an hour that features a Spokane City Council member interviewing one or more people about an important local issue. The council rotates the honors so no one hogs all the glamour and groupies that come with Cable 5 appearances.

French’s guest was Dwight Hume, an urban planner, and their topic was, not surprisingly, planning. To emphasize the point, someone came up with a smokin’ title for the show: “Failure to Plan is a Plan to Fail.”

Yes, that was the mantra of County Commissioner Bonnie Mager during last year’s campaign. But it’s not like it hadn’t been used before that, so she probably can’t smack them for plagiarism.