And, most importantly, what the heck will we call this new, more significant Tuesday? Michael Barone has been sounding the horn for "Mardi Gras Primaries," which I think has a festive air about it.
Ryan Sager's pimping "Super-Duper Tuesday," which has the rhyme factor that the cable networks are gonna love.
Anyway, the news today is that New York has joined the cool kids holding their primaries on Feb, 5, 2008:
That puts this Super Duper Tuesday quite early, just 22 days after the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses, scheduled for January 14. New Hampshire's primary is set for January 22 and South Carolina's for January 29.
The conventional wisdom is that this change in the primary schedule works to the advantage of frontrunners (and New Yorkers) Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton...
In this case, I think the CW is largely right.
Which means, the clock is ticking on ol' Fred! He's already getting his pro-choice creds dredged up, which means he's enduring the hardships of being in a campaign without actually being in it. It would only make sense to jump in and start raising some money, and getting some of that squishy front-runner fatigue love from the conservative base.
Also, for such a close-minded, small-tent kinda party, ain't it funny that every one of our front-runners has imperfect to downright nonexistent pro-life creds? My, if we social conservatives are trying to establish a theocracy, we're not doing a great job of it, even among the ranks of our highest-ranking, allied public officials.