This op-ed by Dana Wormald appeared in the New Hampshire Bulletin on January 11, 2024.
“Meaningless.”
That’s how the Democratic National Committee’s “rules and bylaws” officials described the New Hampshire primary in a letter sent to state party leader Ray Buckley last week. I’ve read the letter – several times, actually. Taken as a whole, it is in no way surprising or at odds with previous messages from the DNC over the past year about the rogue (the DNC prefers “non-compliant”) nature of this year’s Democratic primary – the “first in the nation” with a big old asterisk. As Buckley said in a statement, reported by Politico and others, “They’ve been saying that for a year, yet we persist.”
That’s true, but, man, that word in particular jumps off the page: “The NHDP must take steps to educate the public that January 23rd is a non-binding presidential preference event and is meaningless …”
Uh-oh.
The main point of the DNC’s letter was expressed plainly in the penultimate paragraph: “We are aware that the Party intends to host a delegate selection process on Saturday, January 6. We advise you to inform participants that this process has not been approved by the RBC (Rules and Bylaws Committee) and is therefore not the approved route to become a Delegate to the National Convention, nor will it be recommended for approval by the RBC.”
OK – you’re just trying to take care of some party business by dotting and crossing bureaucratic i’s and t’s and whatnot. Message sent, message received. Gotcha. But how do veteran political eyes scan the letter without a hard stop at that word tucked into the middle of a bullet point: “Blah, blah, blah, MEANINGLESS, blah, blah, blah.”
As an editor, part of me totally gets it. Sometimes you’re tired, sometimes there’s a faint alarm going off in your brain that you inexplicably ignore, and sometimes you’re just human and the metaphorical puck trickles between your pads and into the back of the net. That’s part of the deal when you work with words for a living.
But it seems like the kind of letter, if you’re DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee co-chairs Minyon Moore and James Roosevelt Jr., that you obsess over getting just right because you understand how sensitive the whole thing is. Here you have New Hampshire, a purple state (that maybe, just maybe, you’ll need come November?) with a very long tradition of hosting the table-setter primary, still smarting from a deep wound to its very identity. And then you have a state party truly caught between a rock and a hard place – the national bigwigs and the state’s proud, engaged voters. But what do you do instead of carefully considering how the letter might play should it be made public? You make it absurdly easy to write a headline for a story that’s not all that fresh.
Here’s Politico on Jan. 5, for example:
“DNC blasts NH Dems over ‘meaningless’ primary.”
Whoops-a-daisy.
That was hardly the end of the ripple effect of the DNC’s unforced error, either. As the Bulletin and many others reported this week: “NH Attorney General’s Office sends cease-and-desist letter to DNC in defense of primary.” Sure, maybe the AG would have taken that stand even if “meaningless” never made it into the letter, but it sure didn’t help matters.
The AG’s Jan. 8 letter to the DNC reads, in part: “Regardless of whether the DNC refuses to award delegates to the party’s national convention based on the results of the January 23, 2024, New Hampshire democratic Presidential Primary Election, that election is not ‘meaningless.’ Your statements to the contrary are false, deceptive, and misleading.”
If anybody should know the perils of an ill-chosen word, it’s the DNC. It wasn’t all that long ago, after all, that its most important candidate of the 21st century forever changed the way many hear the word “deplorable.”
But here we are, less than two weeks out from a primary that in many ways feels monumental, and the word “meaningless” is being tossed around by well-placed people who should know better.
Yikes.
Dana Wormald, a lifelong resident of New Hampshire, has been a newspaper editor for more than 25 years.