By Rob Holbert Managing Editor

So the folks in our state legislature have decided they want Alabama to be a “player” in the selection of the next president, and have moved our primary up to Feb. 5, which just so happens to be Fat Tuesday.

Seems the lunkheads in Montgomery don’t know that around these parts, Fat Tuesday is a day for guzzling gallons of hard liquor, coaxing young girls to show their boobs for worthless trinkets and wearing women’s underwear on one’s head. It’s rare to be at a parade and hear someone discussing whether Giuliani or McCain would be a more effective wartime leader or who might lower the capital gains tax. You’re more likely to overhear someone wondering aloud if the chicken on a stick they just ate might have contained rat meat.

Most of us in the partying part of the state realize it’s monumentally stupid to expect any sort of reasonable participation from “The Big Moonpie” if the primary is held Mardi Gras Day. I won’t bore you with the details of how many precincts would be inside the parade routes, etc. and would have to be moved. Suffice it to say, there would be confusion. And drunken voting. Lots of drunken voting.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, now there are various plans being floated that would allow Mobilians to vote a few days earlier, but the votes wouldn’t be counted until the 5th, or some other such nonsense. Oh yeah, THAT’s not a recipe for disaster, is it? I can just imagine if there’s a super-tight race with multiple recounts and lawsuits and they call some precinct captain to the stand and ask him where the voting box was kept during the time between Mobile’s vote and Feb. 5. “Um, in the trunk of my car, your honor!”

I’ve covered enough elections to know no one is going to feel comfortable leaving votes uncounted for several days, or mailing them all in. Trust me.

It makes a lot more sense to move Alabama’s primary to some other day that doesn’t conflict with the state’s biggest party, or just to keep it the same as always. I’m sure if Birmingham, Montgomery or Huntsville had any sort of interesting festivals, they might understand. Frankly, I think the people in the Legislature have done this out of sheer jealousy of our Mardi Gras. They don’t have any cool drunken throw-downs in their towns, so they pick a voting day that will irritate us. Too bad we’ll be too drunk to care.

Speaking of caring, though, that’s the part of this I really don’t understand. Why do we care about having our primary earlier? Do we really think the presidential wannabes are going to come down here and hang out in our living rooms just because we moved the primary? I’ve got news for you, we don’t have a lot of electoral clout and we tend to vote Republican all the time, so we’re not exactly a huge battleground state – especially if we have our primary on Super Tuesday when the likes of California, New York and Florida are probably voting too.

I suppose we could make ourselves a bit more relevant by having our primary on another day – one of those strange primaries that just kind of hang out there by themselves and are usually announced on the news shortly after the weather report. But really the question is why are we so interested in moving the primary up in the first place? Why is everyone so worried about being relevant? Think about it for a moment, what do we really get out of this deal?

Yes, voting is an American right, but honestly less than half of us tend to participate even in the best of circumstances. So it’s not like it’s going to be some big party – well, actually I guess it is, if the primary is held Fat Tuesday. So OK, we’ll score that one a win for the pro-Mardi-Gras-primary forces. Voting drunk could be more fun than voting sober, especially if there are write-ins.

The thought process behind this change is that it will somehow make Alabama more “important” in selecting the presidential candidates, and thus will entice them to come visit us. That would probably work if every other state in the union weren’t thinking about the same thing. Right now, 49 states are considering moving their primaries to next week in order to be first. (OK, that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one.) Alabama’s nine electoral votes aren’t exactly going to turn a lot of heads when we’re stuck right in the middle of Super Tuesday. We’ll probably get a few “fly-bys” from the candidates, but none of them are going to hang around and eat in our Waffle Houses.

So why do we care? Do we really need to have Rudy kiss some babies on Dauphin Street or Hillary to fly over downtown on her broom and write “Surrender Dorothy” to know how we’ll vote? Let’s face it, this whole business is just so some star-struck types can hobnob with “the next president.”

You’re really not going to get much of a sense of a candidate by watching him wolf down Dew Drop hotdogs or listening to him tell us how important Alabama is to the rest of the country, blah, blah, blah. The endless media coverage over the next two years should give you a reasonable idea of whatever it is candidate X is promising, so there’s really no reason to mess up Mardi Gras or to even move our primary.

Unless the candidates want to hang out and get their drunk on during Fat Tuesday. Then we might actually learn something about them.

Rob Holbert is Lagniappe managing editor. Contact him at rholbert@lagniappemobile.com.

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