Democrats: Is Timing Everything?

Lynch: Democrats Debate Changes To 2008 Primary Calendar

(CBS)  Dotty Lynch is the Senior Political Editor for CBS News. E-mail your questions and comments to Political Points

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Democrats, who spent a lot of time in the 1960s, '70s and '80s writing and rewriting their rules for picking presidential candidates, have been relatively quiet for the past 20 years. A commission in the early 1980s chaired by then North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt re-jiggered the small "d" reforms of earlier years, which they decided gave too much power to the people and not enough to elected officials. In addition, they established an official window for primaries to begin and end – except, of course, for Iowa and New Hampshire, which managed to get waivers to continue their early contests outside that window.

But 20 years of calm is about to be broken this Saturday when the Democrats begin looking at the primary and caucus calendar to see if a timing change might bring them closer to the White House in 2008.

There is a tendency to say that these commissions are just a substitute for the real work the Democrats need to do to get back in power. But former CBS News Executive Political Director Marty Plissner - whom columnist Mark Shields once described as having a 100 percent attendance record at all rules meetings of both parties for the past half century – says these panels in the past were more than "a matter of obsessive tinkering by small-minded pointy heads who were not up to the task of dealing with the real concerns of normal people." The Hughes commission after the 1964 Democratic convention ensured the inclusion of blacks as delegates and the McGovern commission paved the way for women. (See footnote for some great pre-Hunt historical detail from Plissner.)

The latest commission has been put together not to correct social injustices, although the lack of racial and regional diversity in the early primaries will undoubtedly come up in the discussion. Mainly it is an attempt to see if there is a better way to produce stronger Democratic presidential nominees not by changing how the delegates are selected but when. There are several questions on the table:

Wither Iowa and New Hampshire?
Michigan Sen. Carl Levin was so upset about the status of Iowa and N.H. that he and Michigan DNC members pushed hard in 2000 and 2004 to put Michigan ahead of them. They finally backed down when then-DNC chair Terry McAuliffe agreed to create a commission to look at the calendar for the 2008 election. Levin and Debbie Dingell, wife of Michigan Rep John Dingell, are both members but Dingell says they are not lobbying for Michigan to be first, just to prevent any state from having a "lock" on that prime spot. Dingell says that based on conversations she has had she believes the commission is "open" to change.

New DNC Chair Howard Dean will not be at the Saturday meeting but the commission will give its recommendations to him at the end of 2005. He had some choice words to say about the Iowa caucuses in 2000 which came back to bite him in 2004. But before he was elected chair in February (with the support of the Iowa delegation) he told the Des Moines Register, "I don't believe that the system's going to be changed or that the order is going to be changed. You're going to have to show me a reason to change. I'm just not going to change it for change's sake."

The plans of Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who has presidential aspirations, may take care of the Iowa issue. If Vilsack runs the other candidates may just cede Iowa to him as they did to Tom Harkin in 1992 and take their marbles somewhere else.

Which brings us to New Hampshire…
New Hampshire has its own task force, headed by former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen's communications director Judy Reardon and former state party chair Joe Keefe, to make sure everyone knows how great and grass-rootsie the N.H. primary is. State Party Chair Kathy Sullivan says she isn't worried about N.H. losing its first-in-the-nation status and in fact hopes the commission "will put that issue to bed once and for all." But she thinks the timing of all the other states should be looked at. "It's the compression of the calendar that needs to be addressed," she argues.

The real issue for N.H. may not be timing but relevance. State Rep. Jim Splaine, who introduced the law in 1975 that mandates that New Hampshire come before all other primaries, told CBS News' Trish Regan that what's worrying folks in New Hampshire is that candidates might decide to boycott the state next time. However, since the 2004 election they have had visits from John Kerry, John Edwards, John McCain and Bill Frist. Evan Bayh's folks have been up there for meetings and a piece of mail from Nebraska's Chuck Hagel has been sited in Durham – so it doesn't look like New Hampshire citizens are being ignored quite yet.

The relevance issue has also been raised by blog big foot Kos, Marcos Moulitsas Zuniga, who says that the Internet has surpassed Iowa and New Hampshire as kingmakers and that the new "retail politics" is practiced in cyberspace rather than Des Moines and Manchester.

Then there's the West
A dynamic that dominated the Hunt commission and even the lofty McGovern and Hughes panels was gaming the rules by prospective presidential candidates. Hillary Clinton pal and Democratic rules-meister Harold Ickes is on the 2008 commission, as are numerous supporters of John Kerry and John Edwards. Colorado political consultant Mike Stratton is a member as well, and his plan is to try to organize a group of Western states to press for an early regional date. Stratton is an ally of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a 2008 wannabe who is also big on a Western day. "I'm not trying to blow up Iowa and New Hampshire," Stratton says. "I just want the West to have its own day" before the nomination is settled.

Or maybe the Rosenthal Squeeze or the Kos Rotation?
Democratic consultant Steve Rosenthal came up with an idea of putting the five or six closest states first so that candidates could be assessed in the battlegrounds – ad the winners would have already gained name recognition and organization in these key states. This would have the advantage of including Iowa and N.H., which were close last time, while expanding the pot. The more democratic of the Democrats, like Kos, are urging a general rotation giving all the other 48 states a shot at first place at some point.

So after 20 years and only two victories, why not let Democrats churn over the rules again? After all, it keeps them off the streets on weekends. The Republicans, who apparently have a lot more to do on the weekends, say they passed the 2008 rules at their convention last summer and they are just fine with them. If Democrats get serious about changing things, they can try doing it by themselves with party-run caucuses. Or maybe Republicans in various states (and presidential camps) may decide to revisit this issue as well.

Stay tuned. Only 1,047 days to go before Iowa – or wherever.

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Historical footnote from former CBS News Executive Political Director Marty Plissner:

The first Democratic reform commission in the mid-'60s was not the cranky product of a bunch of sore losers. It was a consolation prize won in Atlantic City in 1964 by (primarily) Fannie Lou Hamer, Aaron Henry, Walter Reuther and Martin Luther King Jr. as a reward for not sullying the coronation of Lyndon Johnson with a floor fight over the seating of a 100 percent lilywhite delegation from Mississippi.

The second reform commission, created by the 1968 convention, once again was not a salvage operation in reaction to the party's rejection at the polls. The Hughes commission along with the Voting Rights Act had rectified the party's total exclusion of blacks from its Deep South delegations of the past, but the token black presence was still far from a plausible reflection of the region's black population – let alone the part's black supporters at the polls.

But nothing done in the commission's mandate from Chicago dealt directly with the role of women at the party's conventions. Here too the Democrats trailed the Republicans in reflecting what was going on in society. The exact dimensions of male domination in Chicago 1968 were 7-1. This did not lead to anything as radical as "equal division." The McGovern commission guidelines called for "reasonable representation," which did greatly boost the incidence of women in Miami Beach in 1972, but still left it well short of 50-50. Equal division at presidential conventions was indeed adopted as a guideline that year – by the Republicans. The Democrats didn't make it official until 1978 for the 1980 convention.

None of this got the country out of wars where it didn't belong, elevated GDP or made Social Security safe for the next hundred years, but that's not what national committees do.