For the insiders, party may be over

17 December 2003

What's the difference between Al Gore's endorsement of Howard Dean and the smoke-filled rooms of old?

Al Gore doesn't smoke.

To many, though, the stink is the same. Nine candidates have tossed their hats in the ring and here we are, five weeks before the Jan. 19 Iowa caucuses and six weeks before the Jan. 27 New Hampshire primary and for all intents and purposes, the race is over. Dean has more money than anyone else does, he's collected more big-name endorsements and his lead in the polls seems commanding. Why not just cancel the primaries altogether?

Some resist this idea, arguing that in politics, anything can happen and some insurgent - perhaps Dick Gephardt - may derail the Dean juggernaut. Perhaps. If Dean were to lose the nomination, it would be the biggest upset since, well, since John Kerry blew the certain lock he had on the nomination just six months ago. Yet even those not willing just yet to concede to Dean know that the nominee will be known by Feb. 3, at which point just nine states - representing less than 10 percent of the nation's population - will have voted.

So much for democracy, it appears. Indeed, if one traces the history of the nominating process, it seems like things are coming full circle: from insider-driven party politics to the open and democratic reforms of the 1970s and now back to a closed system that seems to ignore ordinary voters' wishes.

National conventions were invented prior to the Civil War. The delegates who chose the party's nominee were almost always officeholders and activists from each state. Then, as now, many resented the idea of party insiders controlling everything and so in the early 20th century, states began to adopt primaries as a way of selecting delegates. That proved so popular that, by 1916, 25 states were holding primaries.

Then, as described by author James T. McDonough, the party insiders began to reassert themselves. The number of primaries dropped and the system became much more closed to outsiders, a phenomenon that was fully on display in 1968. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern arrived at the Chicago convention with the most primary wins yet Vice President Hubert Humphrey - who, amazingly, hadn't run in a single primary - outmaneuvered them. That loss galvanized the McGovern forces who rewrote the rules altogether, handing power almost entirely over to the primaries, replete with requirements about gender and racial balancing of Democratic delegates.

And now the cycle is repeating itself. The Democrats adopted the idea of "superdelegates" in 1984, which meant that close to 20 percent of all delegates got there simply by dint of being party officials or Democratic officeholders. But the cleverest strategy of all - one that gave the appearance of democracy while actually intending to have opposite effect - was the frontloading of the primaries.

Primary season once stretched for months. Primaries were a kind of serial vetting, a drawn-out poking and prodding of the proffered candidates to see which one would be the best nominee.

That changed. The process became ever more compressed so that fully three-quarters of all delegates are now selected by the beginning of April and, even more importantly, a large number are picked in early February.

Democratic Party officials fully understood the implications of frontloading. They figured outsider candidates, with little name recognition and weak fund-raising ability, would not have the time to build their campaigns and get their message out. Frontloading gave the advantage to more mainstream candidates who were more a part of the existing establishment.

So if all that's true, why won't John Kerry be the nominee in 2004?

For Democrats puzzling over the remarkable rise of Howard Dean, that's the million-dollar question.

Part of the answer lies with Dean's ability to tap into the Internet, dramatically using a new tool of mass communication to raise money. Part certainly has to do with the polarization of Democrats over Iraq, with Dean coming across as the authentic anti- war voice.

However, it also may be that the frontloading of the primaries had the perverse effect of rendering irrelevant the entire primary system. Instead it was what happened before the primaries - the "invisible primary" - that began to matter most. And in that world, younger, more active and more passionate voters - the kind who opposed the war and the kind Dean attracted - started to matter more.

It's a curious thing. A system intended to preserve the power of insiders now seems to be handing it over to an outsider. Some party elders, like Al Gore, have figured this out, and are rushing to catch up. Others, no doubt, are still scratching their heads, wondering how it was that the party they thought they knew so well was taken from them.

Talk back to Tom Keane at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.