he rules are never neutral and the process can all but predetermine the product.
Those political truths are seldom demonstrated as vividly as they were last week, when, a scant 35 days after New Hampshire put the presidential primary season at center stage, Super Tuesday brought the curtain crashing down.
As voters contemplate a general-election matchup between a Democratic candidate with a reputation for playing fast and loose with the truth and a Republican champion whose most significant ability, as Thomas Hart Benton quipped of a lackluster 19th-century nominee, seems to be availability, it is worth examining what has happened with the primary season.
Essentially we've come full circle. The ridiculously front-loaded modern primary schedule has effectively returned nominating power to the very party establishments from which primaries were meant to wrest control.
''If you think that the process should allow an outsider to challenge the party's choice, then this latest process is horrible,'' says Steven Stark, a longtime political analyst. ''We have almost gone back to the old system of the smoke-filled room - except it is a larger room.''
The sheer demands of a schedule that saw 13 contests in the GOP race and 15 on the Democratic side - all on one day - have done that.
William Mayer, a professor of political science at Northeastern University and a specialist on the nominating process, says that in 1976, only 19 percent of the convention delegates on each side had been allocated five weeks into the primary season. This year, the number is about 40 percent.
According to the respective parties, 37 percent of Democratic delegates and 27 percent of Republican delegates were assigned just last Tuesday.
To those who say ''So what?'', consider the effect this schedule has not just on the tempo but on the outcome of the races.
''The schedule forced the challengers to run unrealistic bicoastal campaigns that neither could do,'' says William Galvin, Massachusetts secretary of state and chairman of the Committee on Presidential Primaries for the National Association of Secretaries of State. ''That obviously added extra benefit to the candidates who had party establishment support, financial depth, and name recognition.''
With those advantages, Vice President Al Gore won in a walk, while Texas Governor George W. Bush was able to turn what had been a competitive contest, when Arizona Senator John McCain could focus on fewer states, into a rout.
A capsule history of the campaign shows just how absurd things have become. Twelve Republican candidates began the race, including such experienced figures as Dan Quayle, the former vice president and senator; Lamar Alexander, the former two-term Tennessee governor and US education secretary; Elizabeth Dole, a two-time cabinet secretary and head of the American Red Cross; and Orrin Hatch, a three-term US senator.
The candidates spent much of 1999 furiously raising money and wooing GOP activists. Then, by mid-fall of 1999, before a single vote had been cast, Alexander, Dole, and Quayle dropped out. After a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses, Hatch joined them, leaving only two serious candidates - Bush and McCain - to face off in New Hampshire.
Five weeks later, Bush, arguably the least experienced of the serious candidates, is now the GOP nominee in all but name.
Things were almost as grim on the Democratic side.
In 1999, Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator, excited enough interest to lead Gore in the polls through much of the fall in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York. But when Gore beat him by a mere 4 percentage points in New Hampshire, their race fell deep into the shadows of the Republican contest. After that, reporters, eyeing the huge challenge Super Tuesday presented, seemed interested less in what Bradley had to say than in when he would drop out.
Not convinced of the need for change? Well, consider this: Under the current syncopated schedule, a strong argument can be made that neither Jimmy Carter nor Ronald Reagan would ever have been president.
Carter, after all, started the 1976 campaign as a dark horse, a former one-term governor of Georgia who won the Democratic nomination by persevering over better-known rivals.
Stark, who was issues director for Carter's primary campaign, says the longer, more rationally spaced primary calendar of that era let Carter parlay the momentum of each victory into the resources needed to continue. ''It was a set of dominoes in those days,'' recalls Stark. ''Carter couldn't have raised enough money to contest 15 states on one day.'' The winner probably would have been a more established Washington figure, perhaps Senator Henry Jackson of Washington state or Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana.
Given that Carter is generally considered an ineffectual president, some might say that depriving the nation of his stewardship would have been a consummation devoutly to be wished. Yet it was the same extended 1976 calendar that laid the groundwork for the 1980 nomination of Reagan, increasingly considered one of the century's most important presidents. But in the first month of that 1976 primary season, Reagan was almost knocked out of the race. After an exceedingly narrow loss (49.4 to 48 percent) to President Ford in New Hampshire on Feb. 24, Reagan dropped four more primaries in a row, including such important battlegrounds as Florida and Illinois, before claiming his first victory on March 23, in North Carolina.
''We were absolutely busted the night we won North Carolina,'' remembers Jeffrey Bell, a veteran of that campaign. ''We had no money. The campaign plane was flying west to consider withdrawing from the race'' when the results came in.
His North Carolina win quieted calls for Reagan to quit, but even then, his next victory didn't come until five weeks later, on May 1, in Texas. By that point, Reagan, so strapped for cash he couldn't afford to charter a campaign plane, was traveling on commercial flights.
Only after Texas did Reagan's challenge to Ford take off; in the last five weeks of the campaign, he won 10 more primaries.
But had the 1976 calendar looked like that of 2000, ''Reagan probably would have been knocked out early,'' speculates John Morgan, a former Reagan political operative. And had his 1976 challenge ended in short, inglorious defeat, rather than the razor-close race to the finish, Reagan might well have been dismissed as an unelectable, aging has-been in 1980, rather than the conservative champion.
Other drawbacks to this truncated schedule are more insidious: It creates a hit-and-run environment that puts a premium on desperation tactics and devalues substantive debate.
Does any intelligent voter seriously suspect, for example, that Bush is anti-Catholic, as McCain has suggested?
Does anyone believe McCain is opposed to breast-cancer research, as Bush's campaign has claimed?
Still, in the atmosphere of ambuscade encouraged by the top-heavy schedule, that's precisely the kind of politics that predominates. In his new book ''No Way to Pick A President,'' Jules Witcover, the veteran political columnist, puts it this way:
''The present front-loading too often has candidates bouncing from one state to another simply repeating what they've said in early states ... [W]hat escalates is not the substantive value of the dialogue, but the intensity of the negativism.''
A compacted schedule also warps the press coverage, making strategy and tactics, not substance, the focus of daily reports.
Dan Payne, a Boston media consultant and a veteran of two presidential campaigns, says the frantic schedule creates a mismatch between the narrative reporters tell and the information voters need. ''Voters are trying to figure out who is McCain, who is Bradley, but the national media is largely writing analytic pieces telling them that they [the underdogs] are not going to get the nomination and here's why.''
So how do you change the system? Witcover favors a calendar that would schedule primaries every two weeks starting in March, with no more than five states holding a contest on each Tuesday.
The smaller states would start first. In concept, that system would allow less-known candidates to compete without being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the challenge.
The problem with that proposal? ''The genie is out of the bottle and we are not going to get it back in,'' Galvin says. That is, with so many states determined to have a piece of the primary action, it's hard to imagine the big states agreeing to that system.
Galvin says the only plan that might win common agreement, at least in the near future, is the one his association has put forward for rotating regional primaries.
Under that scheme, Iowa would still hold its caucuses in late January, New Hampshire its cherished primary in early February.
After that, the first Tuesday of each of the next four months would see a region-wide primary. The regions would change order every presidential election year, with the region that had gone first moving to the end of the line. Approximately one-quarter of the delegates would be chosen on each of those election days.
That's far from a perfect system, certainly. The demands on a dark horse, though diminished, would still be considerable; a better system, Mayer says, would be to have eight, rather than four, regional primaries.
Still, to quote Voltaire, one shouldn't make the perfect the enemy of the good; the plan Galvin favors is clearly preferable to today's system and perhaps a first step toward something better. It would eliminate needless crisscrossing of the country, add regional coherence, allow more time for issues - and lower, at least somewhat, the brick wall Super Tuesday now presents to insurgents.
The Republican and Democratic parties are discussing the regional primary idea - and, so far, the reception has been good. Still, Galvin believes that if the plan is to be recommended to the states and then adopted, that will have to happen before the November election.
''As soon as one party knows they are the incumbent, then the planning for reelection begins,'' says Galvin. ''And then the strategizing will overwhelm any attempt to reform the rules.''
Who, after all, wants the rules to be neutral when there's a chance they will favor him instead?
