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> This is, I think, a historicist fallacy (the assumption that an entity's
>
>genesis explains its nature). What needs explaining is _why_, at the end
>of the twentieth century, these two primaries (indepentently of how they
>got started) are looming larger and larger (as seen both through the
>'eyes' of the mass media _and_ through the resources candidates throw
>into them.
>
>And the only _historical_ fact* (it would seem) in respect to them that
>has explanatory power is their whiteness and 'rurality.'
>
>
>
I wasn't trying to explain the "nature" of Iowa and New Hampshire. I was trying to find an explanation of why people pay so much attention to them. I don't know how you'd go about doing that without finding out why people *started* paying attention to them. Granted, that's only half the question. The other half is why people *kept* paying attention to them.
So to amend your (in my opinion, absurdly grandiose) formula - explaining an entity's genesis and reproduction through time is sufficient to explain why it exists now. It's true that I didn't said anything about why people keep paying so much - maybe increasing - attention to Iowa and New Hampshire. In my view, it's for the same reason that people keep paying so much increasing attention to fundraising and campaign staff 24 months before the election - it's the ever-intensifying front-loading of the race.
Once IA and NH ended up first, their whiteness and rurality inevitably became the major trope - the Norman Rockwell "realness" of it all, etc. But I would contend that if history had made California first, the trope would be "California - land of the American future, home of the next big thing, etc. etc."
Seth