Abstract:
John Kerry was a lously Presidential Candidate; however he might not have become the unfortunate standard barer of the party were it not for a lucky win in the Iowa caucus.
We need to reform the nation's primary schedule to ensure that all Democrats have a say in the process, and to ensure that a candidate who is unlikely to do well in the general election cannot secure the nomination simply by winning a couple of early primaries.
Because the party is currently considering schedule reform, this is a perfect time to get active.
Let's face it; John Kerry was a lousy Presidential Candidate. I'm not insulting the man as a human being--I think he'd have made a pretty good President--but in terms of convincing a majority of the American public to go out and vote for him, Kerry was fairly well hopeless.
Consider--a silver star winning Vietnam Veteran who rose to national prominence based on the electrifying sentence "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" finds himself running against a candidate who has gulled his nation into fighting an unnecessary war. You'd expect righteous indignation, and a solid condemnation of the man who hoodwinked his nation into this mess. Instead Kerry publicly supports the war, and takes several months to develop some sort of coherent message about why Americans should vote against Bush because of it.
Indeed, the Republicans actually turned this into a campaign theme. Bush loudly and repeatedly accused Kerry of being an indecisive flip-flopper, and even I--a man who spent several months of his life knocking on doors for Kerry--sort of had to admit that he had a point.
So, how did we wind up with Kerry, over, say Dean? Blame Iowa. Specifically the Iowa caucus, the curiously anachronistic procedure used by Iowans to select their delegates to Presidential nominating conventions. How Iowa is not a particularly large state, but it is the first state to host any form of a primary, a primary that Kerry happened to win. This suddenly propelled Kerry from being an insignificant also ran to the Democratic front runner. This perception, moreover was reinforced, and became conventional wisdom a week later when Kerry, still riding high from his Iowa win, won the New Hampshire primary. From that point on millions of Democratic voters simply assumed that Kerry would win, and their assumption became a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I voted in California on March 2nd--little more than a month later--I voted for Kerry, not because I possessed any particular enthusiasm for the man, but because I decided that I might as well endorse the man who would clearly become my Presidential candidate.
Consider this for a moment: the Democratic Presidential candidate in 2004--billed, perhaps rightly, as the most important election of our lifetimes--was decided not by the nation's Democratic voters as a whole, but instead by a small subset of Democrats in Iowa and to a lesser degree in New Hampshire. I mean no overwhelming disrespect to Iowans, but Iowa Democrats--or, more accurately, the plurality of them who voted for Kerry--effectively saddled Democrats nationwide with a lemon. I spent a solid amount of my time trying to sell Kerry to skeptical voters, and let me tell you, a lot of them weren't buying--not because they were die hard Republicans, but because they simply didn't like John.
So, this is a long-winded way of saying that we need to reform the way we select our Presidential candidate. A system that saddles us with whomever is preferred by a few Midwestern Democrats has fairly clearly failed to produce a candidate who could be embraced by the nation as a whole. For three reasons we need to pressure the Democratic party to adopt a primary schedule that gives more Democrats a change to have a real voice in the selection of their candidate:
1) It's fairer.
2) The old system hasn't exactly gotten us back into the White House.
3) A longer primary might have given the candidate, whomever he was (sorry I don't think Carol Mosley Brown could've pulled out a late win) a chance to iron out some of the deficiencies in his campaign. For example if Kerry had to straighten out his story on Iraq in order to win the Democratic primaries, it might not have been a major issue in the general campaign.
A couple of people who have read my prior article have noted that Electoral Reform is impractical. Certainly getting through a constitutional amendment to (say) reform the Senate would be exceedingly difficult. However reforming the Democratic party's primary schedule falls pretty clearly within the realm of possibility. For one thing the current system discriminates against the 98% of us who don't live in New Hampshire or Iowa. For another the party is actually considering primary reform. The committee covering this can be found here: http://www.democrats.org/a/2005/06/commission_on_p.php
We need to make it clear to the powers that be, that the base is disgruntled, and want change.
Michiganders may be interested to know that one of their Senators, Carl Levin, is on the committee dealing with reform. You might want to drop him a line at: http://levin.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm.
For anyone looking for a concrete idea to suggest, you might be interested in the American plan. This calls for a rotating primary, where successively larger states are allowed to vote over a period of ten weeks (staring out with a handful of states with four congressional districts, then moving on to 8, and 16 etc). A outline of the plan is available at:
http://www.ops-alaska.com
or
http://www.fairvote.org/?page=965