THE OPEN PRIMARY JITTERS

The recent tendency of our elected officials to be blindly and excessively partisan is leading people to favor open primaries on the ground that this will cause the nomination of centrist, consensus-minded candidates who can appeal across party lines.

In Utah they already have open primaries, as they do in some other states. And there, Democratic Congressman Jim Matheson, whose views are moderate to conservative, is being primaried by a retired teacher named Claudia Wright, who is a strong liberal and a lesbian.

This situation has attracted the attention of the teabaggers. According to a New York Times story of 6/16/'10, one of their honchos, a state legislator named Carl D. Wimmer, at first proposed that Repubs vote for Wright in the Dem primary because a victory for her would assure a Repub victory in November. But then he rejected the idea, and a spokesperson for the Utah "Tea Party Movement" named David Kirkham said that such a strategy would go against his movement's principles.

Principles? Who knew? What principles does it take to break up democratic gatherings and spread vicious lies about the president of the United States? Can this really be about principles?

I suspect that Messrs Wimmer and Kirkham have realized that sabotaging the opposition in a primary would work better for the Dems in most cases than for the Repubs. Dem primaries are typically between believable candidates with no great differences in their views; but there are always tea-tending screwballs running in GOP primaries nowadays, and Dem voters could get behind them and deliver the difference for them, rendering the Republicult still more extreme and less electorally viable.

Usually fooling with the other party's primary hasn't worked. Most voters don't want to be part of such a scheme. But when somebody controls a bloc of votes, as the teabaggers may, it could succeed. In New Jersey in 1929 the Democratic party boss of Jersey City, Frank Hague, provided 20,000 votes in the Republican gubernatorial primary to State Senator Morgan F. Larson, who he thought would be the weakest nominee. Larson was nominated. But he also got elected and proceeded to make Hague's life as unpleasant as he could for the next four years.

Unintended consequences are the peril that attends unscrupulous cleverness. So perhaps we can look forward to open primaries that serve the solidarity of our national community and not the ambitions of calculating extremists.