The Second Bulen Symposium
on American Politics

"Front-Loading: Is a Blizzard of Primaries Burying the Political Parties?"

Friday, December 3, 1999
University Place Conference Center
Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis

Moderator and Master of Ceremonies

Ken Bode, Dean
Medill School of Journalism
Northwestern University

Organized by the Department of Political Science and the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI

With Special thanks for the support of:

IUPUI Chancellor Gerald Bepko
IUPUI Executive Vice Chancellor William Plater
Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr., Eli Lilly & Company
The Bulen Symposium Coordinating Committee
Bulen Symposium Sponsors and Donors

MS. SHEILA KENNEDY: Well, you all filing in, and in the interest of getting us under way in a timely fashion, I’d like to welcome all of you to the second annual Bulen Symposium on American politics, and a special welcome to C-SPAN and their viewers and listeners. It is delightful to be able to introduce Chancellor Bepko of the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis campus, who will make further introductions and begin our program this morning.

Again, on behalf of both the School of Public and Environmental Affairs here at IUPUI and the School of Liberal Arts, we’d like to welcome you all and hope that you will find this day to be as intellectually gratifying as I think most of us who were here last year found that day to be.

So without further ado, I’d like to turn this microphone over to Chancellor Gerald Bepko who will make further introductions. Thank you.

CHANCELLOR GERALD BEPKO: Thanks, Sheila. I’m pleased to say a word of welcome this morning. We’re very proud of the Bulen Symposium. And Bill Moyers about 30 years ago wrote in Time, "Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a burl, and politics is the burl of idealism." This Bulen Symposium on American Politics was established to provide an arena in which thoughts could flow, be shaped and take flight into the universe of ideas.

The first Bulen Symposium, which took place last year, occurred shortly before the death of the man who was its inspiration, the late

L. Keith Bulen. But it continues on in his memory as it was meant to, proving as he himself did throughout his life that the American political system is above all a process to be cherished for allowing ideas to be aired, opinions to be formed and principles for decisive action to be established in a climate of freedom and fair play.

Keith Bulen served three presidents in major appointed posts, but he is best remembered for his unwavering commitment to the American

two-party system and to using the political process to highlight key issues, to bring forth good and noble ideas in a thoughtful and informative way. In that spirit, we’re about to take part in the second annual Bulen Symposium which is sponsored by the IU School of Liberal Arts and the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs, both here at IUPUI, symbolic of the bringing of the two parties together, and we offer all of you a warm welcome to this combined partnership campus.

As the partnership campus of Indiana University and Purdue University in the state capital, we consider ourselves to be well-suited for hosting this gathering. We have much experience, mostly successful, of our own brand of two-party harmony, or at least peaceful coexistence. This is despite spirited rivalry between IU and Purdue on the football field and on the basketball court.

We graduate both IU and Purdue alumni during our commencement ceremonies each May. It’s one of the few occasions other than sporting events where the IU and the Purdue trustees join together, and at our commencement they join in an atmosphere of the utmost collegiality, stability, pomp and circumstance.

Twenty years ago, I spent a sabbatical leave at Oxford University in the UK. We didn’t live right in Oxford, however, we rented a

thatch-roofed cottage about 10 miles away in a village named, as only the Brits can name things, Brightwell-Cum-Sotwell. It was a merger of two villages that were much at odds up through the 18^th Century, but then formed this amalgamation. I lived there for the better part of the year, and some have argued that it was one of the most important entries in my life’s history that commended me for the job of chancellor of IUPUI.

With our unique history of blending the best of Indiana’s two Big 10 universities in the seat of state government, we think we can provide an ideal forum for the best thinkers and analysts of both the Republican and the Democratic parties to meet together in a spirited airing of views and ideas in the general public interest, even as we are now on the eve of a presidential campaign year in which so much will be at stake for legislative bodies after the 2000 census.

Keith Bulen liked this intellectual environment, the ability to come together as friends and colleagues, even at times of fierce competition. And Keith contributed to this environment when he studied law on this campus, although that was even before the IU-Purdue merger took place here.

Keith Bulen wrote to me shortly before his death to let us know how pleased he was with the first Bulen Symposium, and I think he would want me on his behalf, and behalf of all of us, to acknowledge and thank some of the people who have so quickly and successfully established this event as an important new political forum and an important event on the university calendar.

First he would wish me to thank Sheila Kennedy of our School of Public and Environmental Affairs, who I had the pleasure of teaching just a few years ago as a law student, and Bill Blomquist at the Department of Political Science and the School of Liberal Arts, who looks like a student today, who are the two organizers, and the energy sources for this event.

But in addition, several other people have been instrumental in this year’s symposium, and I’d like to acknowledge them with our thanks: Sandy Donovan, Les Lenkowsky, Tina Hampton, Brian Howey, Marge Hill, Gordon Durnil, and Rick Burris. Please join me in thanking all of these people.

(Applause.)

And special thanks are also in order for Mitch Daniels, Senior Vice President for Corporate Strategy and Policy at Eli Lilly & Company, where he has been since 1990. Before then, however, he had a prominent and productive career in the public and nonprofit sectors, assisting Richard Lugar in various capacities both in Senator Lugar’s second term as mayor of Indianapolis and in his first term as Senator from Indiana. It was in those years that I had the pleasure and honor of being one of Mitch’s law professors in a first year in law school contracts course here, and his enormous talent was evident even then.

Later he became President Ronald Reagan’s chief political advisor from 1985 to 1987, whereupon he returned to Indianapolis as president and CEO of the Hudson Institute.

Thank you, Mitch, for helping to assemble this group of distinguished visitors from across the country for today’s symposium. Mitch.

MR. MITCH DANIELS: Thank you, Chancellor Gerry. There comes a moment late in every televised golf tournament when they trot out the corporate guy to say what a thrill it is for Mega-Motors to sponsor an event, how exciting it’s been to watch Tiger Woods win by nine strokes for the sixth week in a row and how much they hope everybody has enjoyed the show. If you’re like me, you want those moments to be brief, and this one will be.

I have been asked to say a word about a reason for being and coming together here today and remembering carrying on the tradition of Keith Bulen. I look at this event essentially as a conservationist endeavor. Keith Bulen was one of the most brightly-colored and plumed of an endangered species. He was a man of small-town origin, successful in many ways: a lawyer, a sportsman, incidentally an unforgettably formative first boss. Keith Bulen, even at the beginning and the end of his career held public office, but I always thought that he did that just to prove any fool could be an officeholder.

What he was and the reason we remember him, of course, was a party leader, which he viewed as perhaps the highest public calling and which he practiced to the very highest standards of excellence. And so it is to conserve and revere and, perhaps, in some small way to restore an American heritage in which the two-party system was seen not as some appendage to a world of candidates, fund-raisers, mercenaries and pundits, but as the very center of a system which produced decade after decade good governs in a free society.

This is a time of great concern. I’m sure we’ll hear about it all day today, about diminished voter turnout, increased voter cynicism, about the impact of money, about the impact of special interests on the votes and behaviors of public officials. And our ambition here is to elevate in some small way the public understanding, our collective understanding of the roles parties have played and, perhaps, could still again play in ameliorating some of these problems.

Just to consider one flagrant example, I think, of the confusion that reigns today: given that parties, when they function well, serve to insulate and protect public officeholders from the pressures of narrow interests. In fact, parties exist for no special purpose but only for the most general reason of gathering together 51% of the vote and therefore can properly be viewed as the antithesis, the very opposite of special interests. How ironic that too many of our public commentators lump together support of contributions to parties as special interest donations, soft money, or otherwise as suspect as the gifts which they similarly castigate when made directly to causes and officeholders. We should celebrate, I’d submit, anything, any involvement that strengthens the role of these overriding, consensus-building, majority-building organizations and institutions.

Keith Bulen, as Gerry mentioned, lived to see the first symposium. He lived to see both national party chairs come to this city and this building for what I’m sure was one of the very few times outside Washington, D.C., where these two leaders of these institutions came together to debate and to share and to be featured above and beyond all the officeholders and candidates they support. And once again this year, we will have those two chairs as well as the chairs of the Indiana state parties, many other practitioners from the arena of politics in and among us.

We need to convene today in the Bulen spirit. If we should catch ourselves lapsing into nostalgia or defeatism, the walls will tremble, the plaster may fall. Keith is watching, as always, I know, from the VIP section, and in that spirit we need to address these issues in a can-do posture of optimism and looking forward.

Thanks for being here, and let’s get started. Dean.

DEAN KEN BODE: I will tell you what words passed between Mitch Daniels and me as he left the stage and I came up: He said, "Well, Bode, I guess I left you to introduce yourself." My mother is going to enjoy this introduction. She’s watching with Bulen.

I am Ken Bode, I’m a transitional Hoosier. I passed through here for about eight years and loved every minute of being in this state. My job today is to keep us on time. I was helped immensely by that because you started about 10 minutes early, leaving me in my hotel room sewing a collar button on this shirt.

Anyway, first of all, let me welcome you and pay some tribute to the organizers which Mitch has done as well as the Chancellor. Getting all these folks together, some of us for the second year, is a tribute not only to Keith Bulen’s memory but to also the organizational skills of Mitch Daniels and the folks who put this together. You treat us so well when we come here that we want to come back.

I’m reminded by Mitch’s introduction and his reference to Bulen about a trip I once took with a candidate for president: Jimmy Carter. In the early days of doing business, before everything was quite so front-loaded, it used to be that we had a little time to travel around the country with these candidates even after the first of the year. We went to a church, and in the church the candidate was supposed to get an opportunity to speak, but before he did there was a stem-winding, fire-and-brimstone preacher who talked about how we had to prepare for Judgment Day. And he said, "On that day, the pillars will tremble, the clouds will thunder, the skies will open and teeth will chatter." A woman in the front row put her hand up, and she said, "Pastor, I have no teeth." And he leaned down and said, "My good lady, on that day teeth will be provided."

Let me begin this by just simply saying that it’s interesting to bring together journalists, politicians and academicians in this common enterprise. We don’t often get to see each other this way, so we have an opportunity to steal each other’s billfolds and each other’s jokes today, that’s about all.

We’ll be identifying the old ways of running for office, the new ways, and the common denominators in between. Among those common denominators, obviously, are money and Iowa and New Hampshire. Bode’s first law of politics is that no matter how much you’ve changed the nominating system, Iowa and New Hampshire just get more and more important.

We’re talking about the nominating system today. Boss Tweed provides us a scripture for this event. Boss Tweed once said, "I don’t care who elects ‘em, as long as I nominate ‘em." Now, if you think about that, you follow that rule, you’ll be just fine in politics.

We have several panels; we have five panels and a luncheon today. The panel that’s missing here, and I always expect it to be on a program when academicians organize the program, is a panel that might be entitled "Craven Media Celebrity Hounds in an Era of Sex Scandals, Six-Second Sound Bites and Great Loathing for the Public Which Wants to Hear Only About Issues." We’ll just to weave that in somehow to our discussion, if we can.

Okay, let me, then, first begin by introducing our panelists for the first panel today, the panel is called, "The Long(er) Winding Road, Campaigns for the White House in the Age of Front-Loading." I will trust you to be able to sort out who the panelists are by the signs in front of them, but I’ll try to help you out. In order of the period that I will ask them to speak, first of all, Jim Barnes from The National Journal. He’s the chief political correspondent from The National Journal, he’s a man who has had the good sense as a journalist to pick a fine magazine to write for and to stick with that magazine for a long period of time.

In addition to writing for The National Journal, Jim Barnes was also once a segment producer and writer for the CBS Evening News, which helps him understand the broadcast brethren a little bit better, I think, than many do, and also once was a speechwriter for Treasury Secretary Jim Baker which we now know why Jim Baker’s speeches always sparkled so much.

Mark Lubbers will speak second. Mark Lubbers was the campaign manager for the 1996 presidential campaign of U.S. Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana. In the 1970s, he was also a legislative assistant to Senator Lugar and also Governor Robert Orr’s senior executive assistant. He was the senior vice president of Hudson Institute, and has of late taken a strong interest in television and television news which he holds in minimum high regard.

Bill Mayer, on the end right here, will speak third. Bill Mayer’s the associate professor of political science at Northeastern University. He has contributed a great deal to the literature of presidential nominations, and it is a field that, academically speaking, has been a little bit puny, and so Mayer came along and assembled his fine stable of authors and began putting out books that I hope are selling very well.

Barbara Norrander, professor of political science at the University of Arizona, Barbara is a contributor to the Mayer books and has her own books: Super Tuesday: Regional Politics & Presidential Primaries. She too is a scholar of presidential nominations.

And finally, Peter Rusthoven, a partner of the Indianapolis-based law firm of Barnes & Thornburg. Peter was, as you all remember, the Republican nominee for the United State Senate from Indiana the last time around.

Welcome to all of you. Let me ask each of our panelists to take two or three minutes to make an opening statement or if they want to stretch it to five, nobody’s going to object. And we’ll start with Jim Barnes.

MR. JIM BARNES: Thank you very much, Ken. And to the organizers of this symposium, let me say thank you for asking me to participate in a program which honors one of the country’s premier political practitioners of the 1960s, ‘70s and early ‘80s, son of Indiana and its university system: Keith Bulen.

The topic today is front-loading, so let me just try to briefly sketch out how we got to where we are today. It began, I think, with the 1980 presidential election which, coincidentally, crowned Keith Bulen’s career. That year Mr. Bulen oversaw 17 states in Ronald Reagan’s successful campaign for the White House.

But on the other side of the partisan aisle, Jimmy Carter was facing a strong primary challenge from Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy. And when Carter’s strategist looked out at the primary calendar, they did not like what they saw. What they saw was a New Hampshire primary followed one week later by primaries in Massachusetts and Vermont on March 4^th, the first Tuesday of that month, and they thought that this would give Kennedy an unfair regional advantage. And so President Carter’s aides coaxed their friends in Alabama and Georgia to move up their primaries to the second Tuesday in March, on March 11, figuring that that would offset any momentum that Senator Kennedy might gain from scoring early victories in New Hampshire.

Well, of course, as things played out, Carter beat Kennedy in New Hampshire and never really needed to fall back on to those southern states. Another little ironic point, though, is that the man who won on the other side, on the Republican side, Ronald Reagan, captured both Georgia and Alabama on March 11^th, giving him added momentum that helped carry him to the Republican nomination.

But, indeed, those were much simpler times. Through the second Tuesday in March, a little more than a dozen states held primaries and caucuses, and those contests allocated about 18% of the Democratic National Convention delegates and about 22% of the Republican delegates.

Now, Hal Bruno, then the political director for ABC News, and a man who will forget more about presidential campaigns than I will ever learn, sized up the presidential nominating process at the time this way: "Instead of bringing out qualities of leadership and experience desired in a potential president, the system now awards a nomination to the candidate who has the best understanding of rules, how to manipulate them, money-raising ability, physical stamina, a strong stomach and quickness of foot in adjusting their positions between Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida and Illinois.

"There is hope," said Bruno, "that the primary mania, that has reached its peak, and that this campaign will be the end of the marathon route with more states returning to party conventions for their delegate selection after 1980."

Now, Hal sort of missed the call, but he was right in a sense, which was the marathon was ending, and what was happening with the

front-loaded process is that the nominating contest was becoming a sprint which was determined at the outset of this process. And it went on and on.

In In 1984, allies of former Vice President Walter Mondale thought, Well, gee, it would be a great idea to move up some more states into early March, where the former vice president would have an advantage. And so once again, states began to crowd up to the front. What Mondale and his allies couldn’t anticipate is that Gary Hart would win the New Hampshire primary, would generate a great deal of political momentum, and on a day that was supposed to be rewarding, really helping Walter Mondale, Gary Hart on that second Tuesday in March ended up carrying primaries in Florida, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and he won three of the four caucuses held that day in Nevada, Oklahoma and Washington. Mondale barely held on against the Hart surge, winning Alabama and Georgia.

So 1988 rolls around, and the Democrats in the wake of Walter Mondale’s disastrous campaign of ’84, Southern Democrats decide, "Well, let’s create Super Tuesday, Let’s move all of our southern states up together to have a big southern regional primary on the second Tuesday in March, and therefore hopefully we’ll be able to nominate a more moderate candidate." They did succeed in extraordinarily operating in unison and moving up, but once again the political dynamics of 1988 sort of confounded the political calculus.

On Super Tuesday in 1988, the big winners were really Mike Dukakis and Jesse Jackson. And although then a senator from Tennessee, Al Gore did score five victories, his accomplishment, I think, was overlooked by the media which focused on the unusual strength of Dukakis in the South and the fact that Jesse Jackson also carried five states.

In 1992, the Democrats began to tinker with their rules a little bit more, tinker with the calendar a little bit more. They said, "Well, you know, we’ll let the official calendar begin on the first Tuesday in March instead of the second Tuesday in March." And what they were hoping to do is they were hoping to coax California to move up to the first Tuesday in March for 1992, and thereby attract, you know, a real candidate of national stature into the race; attract a Cuomo, a Bill Bradley, someone who could do well in a big media state like California, someone whose candidacy wouldn’t hang on what happened in New Hampshire.

Well, of course, California didn’t move up to that first Tuesday of March in 1992. There was no well-known national Democrat who got into the race but, lo and behold, unexpectedly a relatively little-known governor from Arkansas won the Democratic nomination and won the election that year.

In 1996, once again more states moved up, we had a regional primary in New England for the first time. Bob Dole, the front-runner for the nominating process was probably greatly helped by this large number of states that were moving up early.

But today, if front-loading was a problem in any of these previous elections, it’s an extraordinary phenomenon today. Today we’ve got a primary calendar, where go back to 1980, 18% of the Democratic delegates allocated in contests held through the second Tuesday in March. In 2000, two-thirds of the Democratic delegates will be allocated in contests that are held by the second Tuesday in March.

On the Republican side, 22% of the delegates allocated by the second Tuesday in March in 1980; in 2000, about two-thirds of the GOP delegates will also be allocated by then. And I don’t think we can really comprehend exactly what the impact of this is going to be. I would agree with Ken that I don’t think this has diminished the importance of Iowa and New Hampshire, it may have just accentuated that importance. Those are the first states, that is where the political momentum is really generated, that is where the media focuses. But it’s a funny kind of business, politics is. You know, no matter how you think it’s going to turn out, it never quite does.

And I will just close on some comments by Keith Bulen that he made after the 1974 midterm elections which were not very satisfying for Republicans in terms of what you really expect to happen. Mr. Bulen said after election day, "We got our vote out, but a quarter, maybe a even third of them couldn’t just bring themselves to vote for us."

So with that I will listen eagerly to the academics and practitioners on this panel to maybe give me some real enlightenment as to what the results may or may not be.

DEAN KEN BODE: You will listen next to a practitioner: Mark Lubbers.

MR. MARK LUBBERS: Well, thanks, Dean Bode. Rusthoven and I know why we’re here is to throw a little bit of red meat out on the floor amongst our academic and journalist companions up here. I’m going to do that, Peter, I hope you do.

The indictments of the front-loaded process I think are basically all true. If you want to read a good summary of it, pick up -- is it this month, Jim, National Review?

MR. JIM BARNES: National Journal.

MR. MARK LUBBERS: National Journal, sorry. Different publication.

MR. JIM BARNES: Yeah. But do pick up this month’s National Review.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Read all about (inaudible) college.

DEAN KEN BODE: We learned something about Mark’s reading habits here with that little slip; right?

MR. MARK LUBBERS: But a C-SPAN endorsement for Jim and the Journal, and it’s a great article on the process, and the indictments that are listed there I think summarize the ones that we’ve all read about and discussed for the last decade, decade and a half maybe.

Let me just summarize them by saying they’re, I think, three in number. One of them, in my opinion, is bogus, and I’ll say that one first, and that’s the notion that somehow there’s not enough quality to voter participation. In my opinion, if the presidential selection process has an overwhelming grievous fault, it is that there’s too much democracy, way too far bent in favor of mob rule and way too far bent away from the republic that, I think, the founders envisioned. So that’s the one criticism which, I think, lacks for any evidence.

The second one is probably true, although it’s mitigated, in my opinion, by the fact that it would be true anyway no matter what the system is, and that is that the front-loading process really enables the so-called invisible primary, the process by which presidential candidates become nominated, try to sew up the nomination before the first vote is ever cast. The invisible primary. I would say that the front-loading process, in fact, makes the invisible primary much more likely. This year’s Republican race, I think, is evidence of that. I think the race is sewn up; it was sewn up before the first caucus vote will be cast in Iowa and the first primary vote is cast in New Hampshire.

The caveat I would put on that is there will always be an invisible primary. There should be. The question is how do you want to balance the things that are weighted to become president? Abraham Lincoln participated in an invisible primary in a way. In the spring of 1860, he went to New York City to give the now famous Cooper Union speech, invited there by Seward’s opponent, Horace Greeley chief among them, to give the Republican Party another option. It was a fabulous success; had it not been, Lincoln would not have been the nominee in the Chicago convention.

So there’s always going to be some up ramp to the selection process. There’s always going to be some kind of invisible primary. The question is: What kind do you want?

The final indictment seems to me is the one that ought to call all of us to change the system, and that is that the front-loaded process enables a flawed candidate to win before he should. It seems to me that that’s obvious on the face. I would say that it probably so far hasn’t mattered with one exception, and I would say that’s Clinton. In a properly operating nominating process, I don’t think Bill Clinton would have ever been the nominee. But I think most of the other men who have been nominated for president would have obtained the nomination through what I think is a better process. And better for me, as you’ll see in a moment, is one that involves political parties a great deal more than we involve them today.

I think Clinton is the lone exception.

It hasn’t kept us from nominating people who are flawed candidates. The race that I participated in in 1996, Bob Dole was a flawed candidate, not because he was a flawed man or because he shouldn’t have been a presidential nominee, but because he couldn’t win. This is a candidate who started with a 10-point lead in the summer of 1995, and by the time we were in January of ‘96, he was 10 points behind. That’s a 20-point swing. The more the public came to know him versus Bill Clinton, the further behind he got. This is a problem. When you nominate someone for president, you should nominate someone who can win.

Now, there are other failed examples. Peter and I will talk about George McGovern. I would say that McGovern was part of a cathartic process that enabled the Democratic Party to find itself.

MR. PETER RUSTHOVEN: That’s how he would put it.

MR. MARK LUBBERS: We through the same process between 1900 and 1908, when progressives and conservatives fought it out for the soul of their party. From time to time political parties should go through these things; they’re good things, not bad things. Now, McGovern was flawed because he was the product of that process, not necessarily because he was a bad presidential candidate. I know that seems paradoxical if not hypocritical, but there’s a lot of paradox and hypocrisy in politics, and it belongs there.

I would say the worst thing about the front-loaded process, especially in the world that we live in today, is that it enables the presidency of the United States of America to become the product of the celebrity process that seems to govern almost everything in public life these days. And if there’s one thing, in my opinion, that shouldn’t be a product of celebrity is the presidency of the United States. There will always be a balance here; you always want to elect public people. There’s been an entertainment quality to running for president and being president since Andrew Jackson, and it belongs there because leadership can only be defined one way, and that’s: Are people following you?

Politics is something that people do after work for most people. It’s not something that should be work for them. And so there must always be an entertainment element to politics, but there should not be an overwhelming dominance of celebrity in the process. I think that’s what we had in 1992, in 1996, what we have today in the presidency. If we are able to somehow wrench it out this time, that may be only as a reaction to the fact that we’ve had a little bit too much celebrity. But in my opinion, we should kill that part of the process, we should give a great deal more power back to the political parties, we should make being involved in party politics something that people want to do, and if no other reason, then, that’s how we nominate our presidents.

DEAN KEN BODE: Thank you, Mark. I’m interested in Mark’s commentary on the flawed candidacies of the Democratic Party, how he knows. You know, he concentrates on the flaws of McGovern as a flawed candidate. One time, Walter Mondale called up George McGovern after the 1984 election and said, "George, after you’ve lost 50 states, how long does it take to stop hurting?"

And McGovern said, "I’ll let you know, Fritz."

(Laughter.)

They both lost the same number of states, Mark, you only found one that was flawed.

MR. MARK LUBBERS: I knew that you would want to come to the defense of your old mentor.

DEAN KEN BODE: All right. Our next speaker is Bill Mayer who just passed me a note to remind me that Bill Blomquist told these guys to speak for 10 minutes, not two or three, which means that Mayer intends to speak for about 15.

MR. WILLIAM MAYER: Thank you, Ken. My general perspective when it comes to political institutions tends to be conservative though in an old-fashioned Burkean sense which, as Sheila Kennedy reminded me the other day, is not necessarily the way it’s used by a lot of people today. That is to say I tend to think that political institutions are kind of complex contrivances, that they grow up over time, that they’re imperfectly understood, that in general we tamper with them at our peril. But I also believe, as Burke did, that some capacity for reform has to be part of every institution that hopes to survive, and that there comes a time when the system is clearly in trouble and needs to be readjusted, and I think that front-loading definitely presents such a case.

Of most other aspects of our nominating process, I think it can be said that they’re not perfect, they’re frequently annoying, but on the whole they work tolerably well and, in any event, it’s not clear how we’d make them better. I wouldn’t say that about the way the calendar has developed over the last several election cycles, and therefore I think front-loading is a worthy topic for this symposium.

Jim has done a good job of reviewing history. The question I want to focus on is why is all this a problem? Primaries have to be held some time, who cares whether they’re spaced out or crammed together? And my answer is that, I think, the principal problem with front-loading is that it greatly accelerates the voters’ decision process and thus makes the whole system less deliberative, less rational, less flexible, more chaotic.

To be a bit more specific, I think front-loading makes two kinds of outcomes more likely: The first is a process that’s overwhelmingly stacked in favor of the front-runner. I think we saw this in 1996, I think it also explains why in the 2000 race three reasonably credible candidates early on -- Lamar Alexander, Dan Quayle and Elizabeth Dole -- are already out of the race well before (inaudible).

Well, I mean, there’s a question of balance there to be drawn by. In point of fact, I think you’re right, it is ironic, I mean, it probably proves that there’s no system that’s going to satisfy everybody.

DEAN KEN BODE: Let me ask you something before you go on, if you would. You say your forecasting model predicted seven of the eight nominations --

MR. MARK LUBBERS: Uh-huh.

DEAN KEN BODE: -- since 1980, which one did it not predict?

MR. MARK LUBBERS: The 1988 Democratic race where Hart -- if you remember, Hart gets out in May of 1987 and then rejoins the race. And simply because he’s better known and the race at that point is so chaotic, he takes a narrow lead in the national polls.

DEAN KEN BODE: So Dukakis had the money, but he didn’t have the polls.

MR. MARK LUBBERS: Exactly, exactly.

DEAN KEN BODE: I see. Okay. All right, Barbara Norrander, your turn.

MS. BARBARA NORRANDER: Okay. Well, actually I was going to talk about the ending of the presidential nomination process; how quickly does it end? We’ve talked how long it’s been on the front end and the invisible primary candidates have to raise a lot of money before the campaign starts, but I thought we should give a little attention to when the campaign actually ends.

And I’ve been looking at this question from a perspective that the candidates pretty much tell us when it’s over, because one of the things that really happens is candidates drop out, and they drop out fairly quickly.

Obviously, this year we’ve had three or four major candidates drop out before the race even began, but that’s happened in past years as well. Phil Gramm and Arlen Specter dropped out before the New Hampshire primary in ’96, Governor Wilder dropped out before the New Hampshire primary in ’92, and so did Al Haig. So that has been a precedent for that happening.

But I’m more interested in the candidates who go into New Hampshire and then decide to drop out fairly quickly afterwards. In fact, if you look at candidates and when they dropped out, most of them in the past 10, 20 years have dropped out in March, and this has been true since about 1988. The last candidate who pretty much pursued the nomination to the convention and did not win was Gary Hart. But since 1988, candidates on the Democratic side and the Republican side have been fairly quickly dropping out of the contest. And they do this well before the official nomination is won, so the official nomination criteria is controlling 50% of the convention delegates. Candidates don’t stay in the race that long. They don’t even stay in the race till 40% of the delegates are committed to the front-runner.

First of all, you have to separate the candidates into two types. There are sort of the serious office-seeking candidates, the candidates who are in the race to win the presidency and that’s their single goal. They tend to be governors, senators, sometimes House members who when they start to trail will drop out of the race pretty quickly.

Then there are agenda-seeking candidates, the Pat Buchanans, the Jesse Jacksons, and even the Jerry Browns, who stay in the race regardless of whether they’re winning or losing. The rules for them really don’t matter, they’re up there to express their opinions, to get a platform, to get a little bit of media coverage. And so they may stay in the race for quite a bit of time, and they are important, but they’re not going to be serious challengers.

So if you look at the serious challengers, when do they drop out? They tend to drop out when the leading candidate has a 25% delegate margin over what is needed for the victory. So that is not a very large lead. And it tends to happen fairly quickly, so it tends to be either the first or second week in March, regardless of sort of the front-loading. It was true in ’88, in was true in ’96. ’96 was a little quicker than ’88, but generally by the second or third week in March you have the race over.

And given the front-loading calendar this year, I’d suggest that it’s probably going to be the second week in March when the contest will be over. So the question is: Is that too fast, is that too quick, and again, it depends on perspectives.

I remember some of the old arguments that the 1970 and 1980 and ’84 races were too long, that they represented divisiveness and that that hurt the Democratic candidates. But I also remember the argument from ’96 -- in ’92 where they suggested that the Republican candidates won the race too early. That’s because Bush had won earlier than Clinton, the media forgot to talk about Bush in ’92 and that that actually helped Clinton get some of the attention. So there’s been arguments both pro and con about whether the race is too long or too short, and it kind of depends on who wins and how well they do, I think, in the fall campaign as to whether or not the race is considered too long or too short.

There’s some suggestions that the race needs to be changed. There’s some talk about regional primaries, there’s talk about voluntarily get states to move backwards. There hasn’t been much luck at that, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. There have been 40 regional primary proposals going to Congress in the last 20 years; two of them got hearings and seemed to have disappeared from the scope, and all the rest of them really got very little attention.

There have been movements for regional primaries, there was the Super Tuesday which, obviously, was successful, but the year afterwards about half of those states dropped out of the Southern regional primary. There is a small New England regional primary. There was an attempt this year for a Rocky Mountain regional primary that didn’t get off the ground except for in Colorado. And part of the problem is the state legislatures really don’t have any self-interest in rationalizing the nomination process. They want to do something to get more clout which to them mostly means moving early, or else they want to save money. Indiana holds a late primary because it can hold a primary with its congressional primaries and save the money of an extra campaign.

Or there’s always the let’s-not-do-anything kind of process which is always the easiest. Or there are some states who have kept the same date for all of these years despite the front-loading simply because of inertia.

So we have a front-loaded process, it has its good and bad points, but I’m not sure we’re going to get much change without a lot of effort.

So that was very short.

DEAN KEN BODE: Barbara, you have an opportunity in Indiana -- it is a very frugal state, we all know that; right? But you also have an opportunity in Indiana during your stay here over the next 24 hours or so to talk to at least three state party chairs who will tell you that the additional benefit of having late a primary when it’s all over everywhere is that the state party chairs have a lot more to say about who gets to be delegates on the delegation when they go to the national convention which has the added benefit of, well, a little patronage which Indiana always likes.

MR. PETER RUSTHOVEN: It’s a topic not unrelated to contributions.

DEAN KEN BODE: That’s right. So do some empirical research while you’re here, Barbara, and you’ll advance your theories a little bit on that one; all right?

MS. BARBARA NORRANDER: Okay.

DEAN KEN BODE: All right, Peter Rusthoven, you’re the anchorman.

MR. PETER RUSTHOVEN: Gosh, I feel like Dan Rather. As Ken can tell you about, I disagree with come important observations made by other panelists, first Mark Lubbers’.

Paradox and hypocrisy belong in religion, not politics. And

McGovern --

MR. MARK LUBBERS: What’s the difference?

MR. PETER RUSTHOVEN: This is part of Mark’s world view.

(Laughter.)

The description McGovern’s failed candidacy I think is very unfair. There is no campaign in my lifetime that has had higher entertainment value, and it gave one of the great songs in American history. Few of you’ve heard this, it goes to the tune of America, and the lyrics were: "McGovernment, McGovernment, where income is workfree, we’ll all smoke pot and love a lot when we get amnesty." This was written by the reporters on the bus, and I don’t know if Ken ever heard that.

DEAN KEN BODE: No, I didn’t hear that.

MR. PETER RUSTHOVEN: I always thought the two most important pieces of information you needed to know were whether the AFC or the NFC won the Super Bowl, or whether the American League or the National League won the World Series. One of those predicts the presidency, and one of those predicts the stock market, but I can never remember which.

I think front-loading is significant primarily to the degree it exacerbates or enhances the impact of something that is far more important which is the way you have to raise money to run for office. Speaking as a practitioner, albeit a failed one, the single most important thing you can do as a candidate to advance your cause is to communicate, the ability to communicate what you want to say, not a response to some question in what are styled as debates but are anything but, not a response to some question in what are styled as town forums but which, in fact, involve a very curious and self-selected group of the populous often who ask very oddball questions which are the farthest thing in the world from the themes that you want to communicate in your candidacy. The single most important thing is the ability to communicate. It is the single most expensive thing.

Those of you who are younger than some of the others and may still be foolish enough to harbor dreams of running for office will someday see what it costs to buy 30 seconds of air time to communicate with a significant group of people. And then you will go through the process, if you care about what you say, as I hope you will, of seeing what it takes to try and put a meaningful, substantive message into 30 seconds. And then you will find out -- unless the law has changed as I hope it will -- but then you will find out if you are running for federal office how much time and effort you have to devote to raising money in chunks no larger than a thousand dollars. It’s extraordinary.

The reason the presidential campaigns have become so long, in my view, is because they have stretched backwards. The reason the invisible primary has become so important is because the single most important measure of success during this long period, before anybody except certain people in the media and political insiders are focusing, has to do with raising money.

Some of you will recall a guy named Gene McCarthy. Some of you are old enough to remember that. Gene McCarthy was not a successful candidate in a sense that he ever won the nomination. He was an extraordinarily successful candidate in that he challenged an incumbent president and was the single major reason why an incumbent president, who four years earlier had won in what was then the largest landslide in American history, chose not to seek renomination. Gene McCarthy was an idea-driven candidate. Whether you agreed or disagreed with him, there was no question of sincerity there, there was no question of intellect, there was no question that that was an idea-driven candidacy.

Gene McCarthy was possible because a relatively small group of people, one example who I know personally, is a guy named Marty Peretz, who now owns The New Republic -- not to be confused with National Journal or National Review -- who happened to have considerable personal wealth and made contributions into six figures to Gene McCarthy, not because he was trying to buy access, not because he was trying to buy an appointment -- although Marty, I think, would have taken Ambassador to Israel -- but because he believed in him and wanted to finance Gene McCarthy, communicating with Marty Peretz, and Gene McCarthy thought

-- both thought -- were very, very important messages. That is not possible now.

The result is that very serious candidates for the presidency are eliminated during a period when no one except insiders is focusing, and they are eliminated based solely on who is doing the best job of putting that money together. This has certainly happened in the Republican nominating process this year.

"If you want to make less of something," Ronald Reagan used to say, "regulate it." "If want to make it less available, regulate it." "If you want to increase the importance of something, make it more scarce." "If you want to really do a good job of it, have an artificial scarcity imposed by government regulation."

The possibility of idea-driven candidacies, candidacies that focus on this thing that we hear constantly about issues and import significantly diminished in this era. This also increases public cynicism in a curious kind of way, in my view; unintended consequences of government reform is always the most important ones.

What does media coverage become with the invisible primary? It does not focus on ideas, the media has a natural tendency to focus on horse race anyway, now it focuses on horse race largely to the exclusion of ideas, but on a particular part of the horse race which is who has the most cash. It’s my view that this tends to increase public cynicism about what the nominating process is about.

It now no longer matters that you may have the ability to move an audience, capture their attention, because you don’t have opportunities to do that during the first year, the year before the actual primaries, because you get one freebie which is your announcement speech, and you’ve really got to work to grab something out of that. Other than that, there is no momentum-changing action-forcing event and none that you can generate. You can hit Geraldo, you know, and all the cable shows and the Sunday morning shows, and you can really beat them like a drum and you will get very, very marginal impact out of that. Very marginal impact out of that.

What is front-loading, and how does front-loading effect us? Well, front-loading exasperates, in my view, in this way. Even if you are the candidate who comes out of the blue and wins New Hampshire -- and I thought Bill Mayer was actually describing the future presidential campaign of Jesse Ventura rather than Gary Hart -- I’d like to hear President Clinton speak on Gary Hart’s flaws as a candidate, by the way. Just a thought.

(Laughter.)

Even if you are the candidate who comes out of the blue and wins New Hampshire, what do you do next? Some of you may know that I chaired Vice President Quayle’s enormously successful campaign for the presidency here in Indiana. Someone asked me afterwards if I was going to endorse somebody else. I said, "There’s no objective evidence that my endorsement has any positive impact."

But in talking to Vice President Quayle the day before his press conference and announced that he was going to withdraw, he was actually

-- he had a pretty respectable ground organization in New Hampshire, he had pretty respectable support in New Hampshire including John Sununu and some other people who are less well-known. He had actually -- I think at that point, although still way, way behind, a very recent poll had put him in second place. I think in the national polls it was just barely in the double digits and way behind Bush, but he was No. 2. But as were talking about it, he said, "What do you do afterwards? What do you do afterwards? You win New Hampshire, you now have X number of days with Y number of primaries to raise some astronomical figure. It simply cannot be done."

This is why I agree with Mark that the Republican nomination is essentially sewn up. The only footnote I’d put on it is this: It’s sewn up in the sense that it’s totally George Bush’s to lose. It’s still possible to lose it; you can crater. If he does, the Republican Party faces a really stunning sort of task of "What do we do now?" I’ve never seen -- and this is not a criticism of Governor Bush -- but I’ve never seen this much investment in a nonincumbent this early, driven largely by the enormous desire on our party’s part to do anything possible to get a winner to avoid a third Clinton term.

I think unlike others that there are a couple of things you can do about this. One is for the government to get out. One is for the government to get out of the business of regulating the price of speech, something that I think would have made the founders just flip. If we go back to a system where you can raise whatever you can from whomever you want, but with the only requirement being that you’ve got to report it, and then people can judge whether you’re being bought or whether they’re disturbed about that. But you will have the ability -- unless you are blessed with the ability to have picked the right parents, like Steve Forbes -- you will then have the ability to have people run for office who are not independently wealthy and have a serious chance of communicating a message, and you will see a presidential selection process that’s considerably different from what we experience now.

The other thing is to get away from the primary system at least to a significant degree. If you look at American history, yes, there are some major examples of party selection flaws. Warren Harding comes to mind. But the caliber of people picked for the presidency generally was fairly high, just as the caliber of people picked for the United States Senate in the days when they were being elected by state legislatures was generally pretty high.

And since I’d like to think that there are still some Keith Bulens out there and -- you know, I loved Keith like a lot of people here and rose to that special status where he no longer complimented you on anything or thanked you for anything but just busted your chops all the time, and that’s when you knew that he’d really adopted you. There are still some Keith Bulens out there, and they are tremendous judges of the character and ability of men and women, and their vision is percepted and unclouded by sentiment or by any kind of spin. I want to see those people for whom government and politics and government are career have a bigger role in deciding who runs for these very important offices.

Thanks very much.

DEAN KEN BODE: Okay, thank you all to the panel for your --

(Applause.)

What a terrific start to get us off to here, and we have microphones down here in front. I’m hoping that some of you will add to this dialog by coming down and talking with us. Let me just say, as I go through my notes and listen to these folks talk, I sort of always wonder just exactly what they have in mind or who they have in mind. I’ll try to remember and try to sort out which one of the campaign outcomes -- Bill‘s model didn’t predict and so forth. And as I was listening to Peter just now talk about the need for idea-driven candidacies or outcomes that reward the ability to communicate, and candidates that are not driven by money and so forth, I was trying to figure out just who in the present configuration he might be talking about, and I decided this was the Peter Rusthoven modest genius scheme to advance the candidacy of Alan Keyes.

MR. PETER RUSTHOVEN: This is the same level of perception that elected George McGovern.

DEAN KEN BODE: Just because nobody is at the microphones, and because one time in a seminar at Princeton, Mitch Daniels’ old alma mater, an economic seminar, the day that Jimmy Carter devalued the dollar, the economics professor failed to mention the fact that it was going on, and therefore left all of us students wondering exactly whether he knew if it meant anything in the context of public policy.

We just had what was considered to be the first real debate of the 2000 presidential season last night on the Republican side. I’m going to invite my colleagues here at the dais with me to be commentators for one minute each. You are now being called upon by Bernie Shaw of CNN to give one minute and no more on what happened last night and what was important about it, and we’re going to start with Peter Rusthoven. We’ll go backwards through the list.

One minute, Peter.

MR. PETER RUSTHOVEN: I’m enormously qualified since I did not watch it. However, I did hear it described this morning on national proletariat radio. The most important thing that happened was that George Bush did not make an absolute fool of himself, because that’s what George Bush needs to do.

The second most important thing that happened is John McCain continued to portray the image -- and at least in the college group that they selected as sort of their focus group to watch this thing -- continued to portray the image of authenticity, which is his deal and what that candidacy thrives on, which means John McCain has a possibility of doing very, very well in New Hampshire, and we’ll then see how he possibly raises 60- or $70 million in 30 days.

But the single most important thing was that George Bush did not stumble.

DEAN KEN BODE: Barbara Norrander. An academic view.

MS. BARBARA NORRANDER: An academic view? An academic view is that most of the American public wasn’t watching, and so if there’s no headlines came out of it, and it doesn’t appear that there was any drastic headlines, most of the American public will go on today with little awareness that there was a debate last night, and they’re probably not going to start thinking about the campaign until about New Hampshire.

DEAN KEN BODE: Bill Mayer.

MR. WILLIAM MAYER: I tend to agree in general with Peter that I think the single most important thing was probably the non-effects it didn’t have. I think the critical question coming in was how Bush was going to look. And he looked, I thought, fine; not dazzling, but certainly reasonable.

And one thing that must be said is that the format was a little confining, and that’s partly a matter of format, but partly it’s in general difficult to have a debate with six candidates. And I think the question is what debates will look like if they open up the format or if they can somehow manage to limit them to two or three candidates.

DEAN KEN BODE: Mark Lubbers.

MR. MARK LUBBERS: Hard to have a debate with six candidates? You ain’t seen nothing till you’ve been in one with Maury Taylor and Bob Dornan.

Peter’s observation is obviously correct in that Bush not stumbling was the most significant factor. I’d go one step further and say that McCain and Bush were the only two there that exhibited that special thing, whatever it is, that is leadership quality. I think they showed themselves to be the kind of people that people will follow. The others, I think, made interesting speeches, were mainly commentators, in Alan Keye’s case because, as Barbara said, he’s an agenda candidate, he’s not a real candidate. I think he brings a special quality to the race because he forces people to talk about issues that we ought to talk about at least every four years, but I don’t think he’s a real candidate.

But I think we narrowed the field last night to Bush and McCain, and I think the most disadvantaged in that observation is Steve Forbes.

DEAN KEN BODE: Okay. Jim Barnes, you’re last.

MR. JIM BARNES: Well, I think that the great debate just wasn’t really all that earth-shaking. All the candidates seem to sort of conform to their typecast. I mean, Bush talked about "I’m experienced, I was the governor." McCain played party maverick. Forbes played anti-Washington outsider. Hatch played, you know, "If you love the United States Senate, elect me." Bauer played kind of the candidate small-town values guy. And Keyes was the only one who, I think, played a little bit out of his typecast, was Keyes played Buchanan with his closing statement playing homage to the anti-WTO protesters in Seattle.

But the thing that was interesting to me is that no candidate really tried to break out of sort of the mold that they have been campaigning on. In a sense, you know, with this format or with any format of a debate, you know, that’s to be expected, people really aren’t going to change their general presentation in these kinds of events.

DEAN KEN BODE: Okay, thank you all. Let’s move to the microphones.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Although it’s easy to forget, in Indiana we’ve got a Democratic primary coming up. If I’m not mistaken, although Professor Mayer’s (inaudible) model, Bill Bradley, could stand a good chance of winning the nomination if we’re basing it on national polls and money. But is he going to get swamped by the front-loading process even if he does well in the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primaries?

MR. WILLIAM MAYER: Well, I think the point about Bradley that I’ve been arguing for some time, is you can’t simply expect to do well in New Hampshire and then sort of ride it from there. But, in fact, that isn’t the way that his candidacy is going. He’s now to the point where he doesn’t have to suddenly raise $10 million in the week after New Hampshire, he’s all but even in the fund-raising with Dole. I do think he’s --

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Dole?

MR. WILLIAM MAYER: I’m sorry, Gore.

MR. PETER RUSTHOVEN: No, he’s ahead of Dole.

MR. WILLIAM MAYER: He’s ahead of Dole, good point, thank you.

MR. PETER RUSTHOVEN: Both of them.

MR. WILLIAM MAYER: Both of them. And I think I give him a reasonable shot at winning. I still think Gore is the front-runner, but maybe a 40% chance or something like that.

MR. PETER RUSTHOVEN: I don’t know the econometric model, but I want to interject. There’s a chance in the Democratic side that the Indiana primary is significant this year, depending on how much (inaudible). The last two times we’ve been significant, 1964 on the Democrat side, when Bobby Kennedy was -- ’68 on the Democrat side when Bobby Kennedy is running, and Roger Branigin, the then-governor, is Lyndon Johnson’s stalking horse, and that was one of the events that affected Lyndon Johnson.

And the other time is 1976 on the Republican side when Reagan, I believe, won Indiana and North Carolina on the same day and kept it alive going into the convention. This time, Gore/Bradley might very well not be decided. I mean, Gore’s going to be the guy who pays for this round of Clinton mistakes, and I think it’s far more interesting in a certain kind of way on the Democratic side this time than our side.

MR. WILLIAM MAYER: A lot of the will depend on the reneging done by so-called superdelegates.

MR. JIM BARNES: Okay. Let me just add: I think what’s interesting about the Democratic race is you’ve got a five-week vacuum from the New Hampshire primary to the big Super Tuesday, the first Tuesday in March this time, and those five weeks are going to be very important. If Bradley doesn’t win the New Hampshire primary, he’s just sort of sitting out there for five weeks and still trying to make a case against Gore but not having any real contest to sort of create some momentum, going into those events. And so I think, to go back to what Ken said, if you want to think about Bill Bradley’s viability, you have to think about him winning the New Hampshire primary.

DEAN KEN BODE: Walter Shapiro.

MR. WALTER SHAPIRO: I’m a speaker later today, but I at least wanted to raise what Jim Barnes just raised which is the fact that the system has this odd way of repairing itself even from the abuses of

front-loading. Because the Democrats clung to their model of nothing other than Iowa or New Hampshire before March 7^th, we have this bizarre situation which very few people other than political junkies like Jim Barnes and myself have paid attention to, that during the month of February, there are Republican contests almost every week, and McCain and Forbes will be very lucky to get out of February alive.

On the Democratic side, you have a freeze frame. You have New Hampshire on March 1^st, and then the most bizarre coitus interruptus in the history of American politics, five weeks of silence.

MR. JIM BARNES: That can’t be true.

MR. WALTER SHAPIRO: And I’m really actually interested that the panel says, I take the notion that it magnifies New Hampshire’s results to almost a ridiculous degree. If Gore loses New Hampshire, he will probably go through three separate campaign staffs in the month of February and move his campaign headquarters to Los Angeles.

But I do want to ask the panel, are they absolutely convinced that it will have the effect of magnifying New Hampshire, or will the New Hampshire effect sort of dissipate by mid February?

MR. JIM BARNES: I think that’s a very interesting question. Once again, we just don’t know. I think one thing that is going to be interesting in terms of just the dynamics of the media coverage is that you will have this funny situation where you will have had the New Hampshire primary on the Democratic side and then no other event until the first Tuesday in March. Yet the Republican contest will be ongoing with many events each week, as Walter said. And so the media coverage, it seems to me, if experience is any guide, and with Ken to maybe back me up on this, I mean, the media coverage is going to go where the contest is. And so I think you’ll have an extraordinary amount of attention being paid to the Republican contest coming off the New Hampshire results and then flowing onto successive states: Arizona, South Carolina, Michigan, Virginia.

I think that the crowded Republican contest in February puts a real challenge on someone like John McCain, because let’s say John McCain wins the New Hampshire primary, well, he will get a great boost out of that and he will be able run around the country to -- first places he think he will go, I would predict, will be New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix to raise money. But the problem that McCain will have is while he’ll be able to raise a lot of money in the wake of a New Hampshire success, he will also have to spend a lot of money before you even get to that first Tuesday. He’ll be spending money in places like Virginia and Michigan and South Carolina and Arizona and assorted other little contests.

And so I would predict that an upset winner on the Republican side in New Hampshire will get less momentum because it will be sort of dissipated. I mean, his financial reserves would be dissipated -- unless it’s Forbes, of course -- would be dissipated by this clutch of events.

On the Democratic side it’s hard to tell, but I think, you know, there’d be a lot of focus. Gore loses, I think while to your right there’ll be great speculation about what Gore does next and a lot of attention. Of course, if Bradley loses, then I think you have a lot of people in the party saying to Bradley, "You know, what’s your rationale? You know, you’ve lost New Hampshire."

MR. WILLIAM MAYER: Two real quick things: One, I love counting on the other side’s race. We Republicans always feel that we get a lot of advice from The New York Times and The Washington Post about what the Republicans should do. So counting on the other side, Gore is supported by a lot of institutional investment right now. And institutional investment in the political side is no more deep-seated and emotional than it is on the economic side. Gore loses and there’s nothing to change that over a month, that’s a stock that starts dropping in value real, real fast.

On the Republican side -- what Jim was just talking about is illustrated in part by what happened in 1980: Ronald Reagan lost the Iowa caucuses in 1980, and George Bush was up there talking about how he had the big mo’, literally in those words. But what it did was it set up New Hampshire as a much, much bigger deal, and then Reagan’s victory in New Hampshire was like, you know, "This is over," and in part built up by the fact that interest was high because he’d lost in Iowa.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I just wanted to say that the notion of a

five-week gap in the schedule is actually not unprecedented. That was the case in both ’76 and ’80: There was Iowa and then five weeks before New Hampshire, the notion that they’re eight days apart didn’t begin until 1984. So, in fact, the 1980 Republican race is an interesting parallel where George Bush wins in Iowa, and if you go back and look at the press coverage, it is remarkable how many people wrote Ronald Reagan’s political obituary. I remember -- is it Bob Petit, Tom Petit (phonetic)? Tom Petit the next day said, "I think we should say that Ronald Reagan is politically dead now." Well, in case you slept through the 1980’s, he woke up.

My guess is if Gore loses, or whoever loses, there will be a lot of talk about, "He’s over. The race is over." And the smart thing for that candidate to do is simply not to panic; and if he doesn’t, within a week those sort of stories will have run out and he will have some time to recover and write his -- whether he will, in fact, use that time productively, which Reagan did, is a different matter, but I don’t think it’s quite as unprecedented as … yeah.

DEAN KEN BODE: I will just in the interest in time give up my opportunity to disagree mildly with Jim’s scenario -- Jim Barnes -- who invited me to agree with him. I’ll tell you sometime about what I really think will happen then, but we can all spin scenarios. This will have to be our last question because we have a coffee break awaiting and another panel.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name’s Gary LeFall (phonetic), and I’m a retired political writer. And I like what Jim and Bill just said about 1976 and the Iowa precinct caucus, and I was out there because Birch Bayh was a candidate. And how many people on this panel remember the highest number of votes in the Democratic Iowa precinct caucus? Who did it go to?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Uncommitted.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: 37. All right. I was out there in the Des Moines Hilton, and there wasn’t one reporter that even hinted at that. They all said, "Carter wins two to one." Now, two to one to me is like maybe 55/27. It was 29 to 14. You couldn’t have said --

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: He didn’t even get 29. He was --

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think it was, I checked with the audience, I heard it stated. The thing is that how many different ways can you write that story? And I’m talking about the media and the front-loading.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You can say two to one, okay? You could also say that after spending six months in a state with six congressional districts this man barely gets one vote out of four. And I was writing for a p.m. paper, so can I take --

DEAN KEN BODE: Iowa has nine congressional districts and had 10 then.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: 10? I thought -- I don’t know, Indiana has nine or 10.

DEAN KEN BODE: Check it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don’t know. I’ve got my almanac here. But anyway, the thing is, 37% after this intense media coverage, a third of Iowa Democrats decided they couldn’t decide.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But the media gave it Carter, and he was on his way.

DEAN KEN BODE: That’s not entirely true. Remember, a third of the Iowa Democrats did not decide they couldn’t decide, they voted for the party establishment who were the delegates in the uncommitted slate.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But they’re uncommitted.

DEAN KEN BODE: That’s a little different.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, and that’s even more of a conscious decision that they were undecided.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: No, I actually think you’re right. I remember that night that Walter Cronkite came on the CBS Evening News and said, "The Iowa Democrats have had the first say in the 1976 race, and what they’ve said was ‘Jimmy Carter.’" And I’ve always thought that that was a huge, very important decision to spin it that way and, frankly, not a very responsible one.

DEAN KEN BODE: How would you have reported it?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I think it should have been said that, you know, the race was -- let me qualify. I mean, I think it should have been left as much more open, that it was unclear if the media -- if --

(Laughter and applause.)

At the very least I would have qualified it a bit. To say, "They said ‘Jimmy Carter,’" just seems to me a dramatic overrepresentation of what Carter achieved there. That’s my only point. And a significant -- you know, you ask why it is that nobody goes to caucuses and votes uncommitted anymore. There’s an obvious reason: They learned in that particular thing that uncommitted are ignored by the press, and any attempt to kind of leave the race from -- to prevent the race from collapsing early around a single candidate is unavailing because the press will simply ignore it. That’s, I think, my point.

DEAN KEN BODE: Okay, having had my dose of crow, I will now unconvene this panel, and we’ll have some coffee.

Thank you very much.

(A break was taken.)

DEAN KEN BODE: Okay, I guess we can begin the second panel, another distinguished group of journalists, academicians and politicians.

The title of this panel is "The Earliest, the Earlier, the Later: State Strategies, Front-Loading, and Its Effects."

I’m reminded of, since we’re talking a lot about religion and politics in each panel so far today, of a candidate who went to Iowa early on, Governor Branstad’s home state, obviously, and was going to one of those church suppers on a Sunday evening in Iowa, where he’s going to get to eat a little bit with the parishioners and then also give a little bit of a speech. As he went up the sidewalk to the church, there was the announcement panel outside the church, and it said on the panel that the subject for that day’s sermon was "Tired of Sin? Come on in." And scrawled in lipstick across the pane of the glass, it said, "If not, call Marge, 866-" --

(Laughter.)

To my immediate right, your left, is Governor Terry Branstad of Iowa, four-term governor of that state. He was chairman of the National Governors’ Association, chairman of the Republican Governors’ Association, a very dedicated defender of Iowa’s early caucuses and his right of the state of Iowa to have those caucuses. And earlier this year, for I think the first time -- I guess did you endorse Dole last time? Yes, he endorsed Dole, but this year was the chairman of Lamar Alexander’s presidential campaign.

I’m going to introduce these folks in the order that we’ll ask them to speak. Jack Colwell, at the end of the panel is a columnist and political writer for The South Bend Tribune, he’s been such since 1964, covered many political conventions, hosts a Sunday television program called Politically Speaking.

Mike McDaniel, the state chair of the Indiana Republican Party. And Mike, you’re also the president of the Republican state chairs nationally, aren’t you?

He was chief of staff for Lieutenant Governor John Mutz, and he is a media celebrity from his days on Indiana Week in Review.

Bob Mulholland, campaign advisor for the California Democratic Party, a post he’s held since 1991. He’s been a delegate to every Democratic National Convention since 1980 and will be again in the year 2000. At least one delegate seat is wired already in California.

MR. BOB MULHOLLAND: A lot are.

DEAN KEN BODE: He has been active for 25 years in the California Democratic Party as a campaign consultant, and among the highlights of his career has been that he helped Tom Hayden win his California Assembly seat in 1982, and that he was called to England in 1997 to help Tony Blair win his Prime Minister’s job in England, so from Hayden to Blair.

Rob Winston. Rob Winston at the end of the table -- yes, there you are -- chairman of the Indiana Democratic Party, elected in March of 1999. He was a special assistant to Lt. Governor Frank O’Bannon and now moved up to take over the party.

So, let us begin with this panel in the order that I introduced them, and we’ll start with Governor Terry Branstad.

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: Ken, thank you. I thought giving a little background on how we came to have the first in the nation caucuses might be helpful. Iowans are very conscientious, and back, I guess in the ‘60s, a decision was made to have the party caucuses on the same night because our caucuses are held in the wintertime, it’s dark and not too many people participated. So the idea would be the Republican and Democratic caucuses would be held the same night so they could be publicized together and try to increase participation.

I think it was George McGovern that discovered that "Hey, this is an early test, and maybe I can beat Mr. Muskie in Iowa." If you recall what happened, not only did he do well in Iowa, but Muskie went up to New Hampshire and made a fatal error up there, and McGovern indeed became the nominee.

And then along came Jimmy Carter in 1976 and came to Iowa as an unknown Southern governor and came in second undecided, and that launched his candidacy. And so ever since the caucuses have become more and more important for both parties. We’ve have some hotly contested caucuses, and now, of course, in recent cycles we are starting to see this movement of other states that are somewhat envious of Iowa’s position and New Hampshire’s position, trying to move up to get into the limelight. But what that has done, it has put even more emphasis on how well people do in those early tests. And this year, of course, this summer we had a straw poll, which was the biggest political fund-raising event ever held by the Republican Party in Iowa. It raised a million dollars and (inaudible) the field, which is what caucuses normally do.

We have moved the caucus date up twice this year. We are now the 24^th of January. And I hope this is as far as it goes, and it is, because we really are working in conjunction with New Hampshire where the Secretary of State can set the primary date. And our law says we’re going to be eight days ahead of New Hampshire.

But it’s interesting, and in fact, my wife is already sick of the political commercials. My wife has never been that interested in politics, but she’s put up with it for a long time, and it’s pretty hot and heavy. But at this point, again, I guess I’m a strong believer in the caucus system because indeed we have a lot of people that come out and participate. Even though it’s not a primary election and people have to come out at night, there’s no way that you can vote by absentee ballot. You don’t have all day to vote, you have to come out to a particular site at night to express your preference.

And each of the parties has their own rules. The Democratic Party has more of a proportional system. And really, the Republicans do a straw poll, and then the delegates are selected separately from the poll results.

But it has become an important test.

And also, just I guess as a former governor, it’s been great. How do you get people to Des Moines in January? This is a good way to get a lot of people that otherwise might not visit the state, and it’s brought a lot of attention to the state. In fact, one of the national television networks decided to have their reporting from the state capital one year, and they lit up the capital building. We thought it looked so nice, that the state decided we would do that on an ongoing basis.

So I think the caucuses have been a good thing. And by starting in a smaller state like Iowa and New Hampshire, somebody that isn’t -- and at least this has been the historic justification -- that doesn’t have all the financial resources but is willing to work hard and put an organization together, can emerge as a viable candidate.

And the system, obviously, has changed, but I think all of this effort to bunch things together has put even more emphasis on doing well there. That’s why I think that Mr. McCain has made a fatal mistake by bypassing the Iowa caucuses and not competing, because I think he’s put himself in a situation where he’s only competing in one state. I don’t see how you can get the nomination if you don’t compete in more than one state. If you were to do surprisingly well in Iowa and New Hampshire, that’s one thing. But if you bypass Iowa and only New Hampshire, and with the others coming so fast, I think that’s a -- well, anyway, that’s my editorial comment.

DEAN KEN BODE: For right now.

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANDSTAD: For now.

DEAN KEN BODE: Governor, let me just ask you a quick question, if I could, before we move on. Iowa seems to make it harder for people to vote than it necessarily would have to be. A year ago, we sat in this room at the first Bulen Symposium, and there was a lot of lamentation about the fact that we have low voting turnout, people aren’t turning out and what have you. You say a lot of people vote, but in perspective a very small percentage of the population of Iowa comes out in those cold winter nights and those caucuses at the schoolhouses and the bank buildings and what have you around the state, you’re kind of running counter to prescribed notions about whether it should be easier or harder to vote.

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: Well, remember, the caucuses still are fundamentally a party organization event in which you not only -- as part of the presidential nominating process, but it’s also the first step in nominating people that would become delegates to the county convention, the district caucuses and the state convention. And that process begins with the precinct caucus, it’s also an opportunity for people to bring resolutions and platform ideas. And so it really is somewhat like the old New England town meeting where people can come together and talk about issues that they’re concerned about.

And so, it is different than a primary, and we have actually made it easier for people to participate in the primary and general elections. Now so many people vote by absentee ballot. But the caucuses are different, they are a party function, although you can change your party right there at the caucus. If you decide that you’ve been registered no party or with the other party, and you want to switch that night, you can do that.

And we normally will see, I think, over a hundred thousand people participate, probably, in the Republican caucus, and I would think the Democratic caucus would have a similar number, maybe not quite as many.

But for coming out on a dark night in the winter, that isn’t too bad. I can tell you in the non-presidential years, the turnout at those caucuses is much smaller. And so all of the hype and all the advertising and all the efforts of the candidates makes a huge difference.

I remember my precinct in Lake Mills, which is up near the Minnesota border, when it was the Reagan-Bush battle of 1980, and the only candidate that came to our precinct that year was Bob Dole, and he got one vote. Reagan carried the precinct, and Bush came in second, and there were probably 150 people that participated in that caucus.

DEAN KEN BODE: Okay, I’m advised to remind all the speakers to just try to speak into the microphones if you could do that, please. I think we’re being recorded, and the TV folks back there are interested in what we have to say.

Jack Colwell.

MR. JACK COLWELL: Thank you, Ken. In talking about this rush to judgment and the front-loading of the primaries, we haven’t talked too much about the effect on the voters and what they think about this. And I would suggest that many of them are really bored by it at this stage and that a danger is that we will be picking the nominees before most of the American people have even focused on the fact that there are nominees to be selected.

The process really should exist for the people, it should not be the other way around. And I would suggest that if there are going to be some changes that the effect on the voter should certainly be considered and that we should seek ways to cut out some of the apathy that clearly exists and to do something about the low voter turnout.

Now, obviously, front-loading and rushing to judgment on the nominations is not the sole reason why vote totals drop in the presidential primaries, but I think it is one of the reasons.

I’d like to cite an illustration that Keith Bulen certainly would have liked; it’s the type that he often used. It involves a candidate in my hometown in South Bend, Indiana, Landslide Lanetti (phonetic). Landslide was running unopposed, and he lost.

(Laughter.)

It’s true, he was unopposed and he lost because not one person voted for poor old Landslide. Now, you might ask: Why didn’t Landslide vote for himself? Well, he was taken ill the night before the election, he was in the hospital that day. So he could not vote for himself.

Now, his wife did vote.

(Laughter.)

But Landslide did not get a vote and, of course, could not be elected. Although there’s a happy ending to this story, because he was later appointed to fill the vacancy, so he did get to serve.

Now, this is kind of a humorous incident that can happen when the vote total is light, but there are some very serious things that can happen also when vote totals are light. We know, certainly, the enhanced

special-interest impact that develops, the one-issue organizations that have more clout when your average voter is staying home instead of going to the polls.

As our two state chairmen here will attest, it’s really a problem in the Indiana primary getting people concerned about presidential politics when our primary here is in May, and usually the nomination has been sewed up a long time before that. The last the time there was a significant Republican primary in Indiana, a presidential primary, was in ’76 when Ronald Reagan did well.

The last time there was really an impact from a Democratic primary, and really the last time that the state was the focus entirely of the news media for at least a week or two in presidential politics was in 1968. That’s when Bobby Kennedy was running in a test against Gene McCarthy who, of course, had already been in and had done very well in New Hampshire. And Roger Branigin, then the governor of Indiana, started out as a stand-in for Lyndon Johnson. When Lyndon Johnson got out, he was regarded as a stand-in for Hubert Humphrey.

There was wild excitement among the voters, a lot of coverage from the news media for that event; crowds such as I’ve never seen in all the

primaries that I’ve covered, or even general elections. And to contrast the situation then and now, the New Hampshire primary back then, in 1968, was on March 12^th. Now, with all the March 7^th primaries, it would appear that the nominations already will be decided before the time when the New Hampshire primary was even held back in 1968.

It wasn’t until March 31^st that Lyndon Johnson made his statement that "I will not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party." Hubert Humphrey didn’t announce until April 27^th at that time. And, of course, Bobby Kennedy ran in the California primary, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in June of that year, and the nomination was still at stake in June. And Kennedy, unfortunately, was shot, as we all know, the night after he had won the California primary.

In 1968, only a little less than 40% of the delegates were selected in all of these primaries, quite a difference from the way things are now with more and more states having primaries, and the national conventions now seeming to mean very little.

Governor, I would like to talk a little bit about that straw vote in Iowa, because I kind of admire the Iowa caucuses, and I hope they still do have some impact. I think it’s good to have them first, but I’ll tell you, that straw vote is nuts. It’s kind of a question like --

(Laughter.)

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: Unless you’re trying to raise money.

MR. JACK COLWELL: Well, I was just going to say, it’s kind of like Do You Want to be a Millionaire? and the final answer from Iowa is yes, and they have this fund-raiser, but my gosh, this time it knocked out some candidates including Dan Quayle from Indiana. Now, a lot of people probably think that’s a good thing that he got knocked out, and I don’t think he was going to go on to win the nomination at all. But, gee, as a former vice president, a man -- certainly not just a buffoon as he may be portrayed on some of the late-night talk shows -- a man with some message to give, it seems as though he should have at least been able to survive until the actual caucuses and not to have been seeing his campaign end with poor showing in the straw vote.

And that’s exactly what happened. He went out for just a little bit, but after that poor showing his fund-raising dried up, some of his key supporters abandoned him, and the news media gave him scant attention except, perhaps, for some of the negative variety that he seemed to be able to get so often.

And this, of course -- and you may want to defend it, think that this is good, but you buy your voters.

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: I’m not going to say it’s good. I will say that it’s better than it was four years ago when we let people out of state vote in it.

MR. JACK COLWELL: Oh, Senator Gramm brought them in from Texas then, didn’t he?

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: Well, my cousin from Minnesota came down and voted. I mean, there were busloads. And actually, you had another senator, Senator Lugar, brought busloads from Indiana.

DEAN KEN BODE: Yes, he did, sure.

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: There were planeloads that came up from Texas for Gramm, and Lamar Alexander had folks from Tennessee.

I mean, they came from all over.

Actually, this was a brainchild of Brian Kennedy, who was my campaign manager in my last campaign as a way to raise money for the Republican Party of Iowa. And I’m going to say the net result is after more than a decade of Democratic control of both houses and legislature, we gained control of the legislature using the money that was raised from the straw poll.

So from that perspective and what the goal was -- now, the straw poll is not the caucus, and yet the turnout this time was so huge this summer, it was limited to Iowans, it was an early test of organization, and the results very much mirrored the scientific polling. And so as a result, for people like Lamar Alexander, who I was supporting, Dan Quayle, I think they could see that they were just not -- not only were they miles behind George W. Bush in the fund-raising department, they didn’t have the organizational clout in the state to turn the people out at the straw poll.

Now, I think the caucuses are a better indication of that because you don’t have to travel halfway across the state to go to Ames to vote, there’s an opportunity to vote in your home precinct or least in your home county.

But I think recognize that for what it is. It was a well-orchestrated political fund-raiser, and from that perspective was good. And I think having it when they had it, in the summertime on a beautiful day on the Iowa State University campus was a positive thing from that perspective.

And I think that just because of the front-loading that that’s taken on significance beyond what maybe it really merits.

MR. JACK COLWELL: I think it does because of that --

DEAN KEN BODE: Jack, you have sent this panel mildly adrift here with your complaint about the Iowa straw poll. So I’m going to say thank you, and now we’re going to get the panel back on to where we’re supposed to be, which is why the states follow these strategies to move their primaries to the top and try to do this. And I’m going to turn to Mike McDaniel who represents a state that never has.

MR. MIKE McDANIEL: In fact, we received bonus delegates for the 2000 Republican National Convention because we didn’t move our primary forward, which we’re grateful to have those extra delegates. It’s always fun to have as many people as we can.

Well, thank you very much for letting me participate today. This is kind of an awkward topic, I think, for Robin and for me because we’re such non-entities when it comes to the primary season, at least in presidential politics because we are so late in the process. But before we get completely away from what Jack and Governor Branstad were talking about, let me just say I disagree with Jack. I think the straw poll is a great idea. I only wish we had thought of it first. And if I ever have one, we will let everybody in America vote.

(Laughter.)

Because that has got to be the best fund-raising scam in the history of fund-raising scams, and I tip my hat to Iowa for doing that. And I know Brian, and he did a great job of putting that together.

Let me just say that it’s interesting to me, I found out a little tidbit a few months ago that I never knew about this process. I was up in New Hampshire for what they called their First in the Nation Kick-off Dinner, which was another scam that they do to make money to bring all the presidential people in early and sell a lot of tickets. Steve DuPrey, who’s the great Republican state chairman there, you can imagine what it’s got to be for him to deal with this on a daily basis up there.

But I was at this dinner, and after the dinner I went to the statehouse and got a tour of the statehouse and met the Secretary of State of New Hampshire. And he said, "Where are you from?" And I said, "I’m from Indianapolis." And he says, "Oh, Indiana!" He says, "You’re our favorite state!" And I said, "Well, why is that?" He says, "If it wasn’t for Indiana, New Hampshire wouldn’t be first in the nation."

I said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "Sometime between 1916 and 1920, Indiana moved their primary to May, and when they did that, New Hampshire became the first state primary in the country."

And so up until 1916, Indiana was first. And so all of you in this audience today, many of you who have been active politically for a lot of years, I don’t know if you knew that or not. But it certainly came as a surprise to me. Think of the money we could have in this state and the joy we could have with all of these people coming in and dealing with the media markets that they would have to deal with in Indiana, including Chicago, Louisville, Cincinnati and all the peripheral markets that they would have to deal in, it would be quite a circus here in our great state.

So that was a little tidbit I didn’t know about, but certainly it causes you to pause and think about what we could be today in the presidential sweepstakes.

Because we are in May, obviously we are not players in the presidential sweepstakes, and that doesn’t bother me a whole lot. I know that our people in Indiana are probably not going to be very interested in moving the primary up for a couple of reasons: 1.) We’re pretty pragmatic about how we spend our money in Indiana from the governmental standpoint, and it’s very expensive to put on any election statewide. And the discussion was to have a separate presidential primary election if you moved it up, and then have another primary election for your other offices a little later in the year, probably around the time we traditionally do in May. But believe me, that will never fly with the Indiana General Assembly because they don’t want to pay for two primaries. It is very expensive for counties to put those things on, especially when so few people participate.

Then there was talk about, well, let’s move them all up and so that all of the elected offices in Indiana are up early in the year so that we can get into the presidential sweepstakes. Well, I find that to be probably impossible for our legislators to do because even in the short-session year in the even-numbered years, our legislators don’t want to have primary opponents at home running against them while they’re stuck in the statehouse trying to craft a legislation that they deal with.

And "craft" may be a friendly word, but -- it may rhyme with "craft." I don’t know, I don’t know what it is.

(Laughter.)

But they’re not going to do that to have people come in and run against them while they’re in the statehouse during the legislative session. So I think there are practical considerations for us in Indiana to basically leave it the way it is.

My first choice, in the spirit of L. Keith Bulen, would be to eliminate the primaries completely and strengthen the parties by going back to real conventions and letting the two major political parties decide who their candidates are going to be. I can’t believe I’m still kissing up to Bulen after his passing, but I may run into him again someday, and I’m already starting to kiss up again to Bulen. But I’m serious about that. If you want to strengthen two major political parties in this country, and I do think they do have a role and will continue to evolve and have a role, the best way to do it would be to eliminate the primaries.

I use the argument that that is the ultimate campaign finance reform. If you want to keep your presidential candidates from going out and having to raise 60- or 100 million dollars, one of the ways to do that is to eliminate how much money they actually need. And if you can shorten the presidential sweepstakes by cutting out the primaries and having the conventions and go from the conventions until the end of the campaign, you only need about a third of the money that they currently go out and raise. So that is one way you could do that.

Now, I’m also very pragmatic about this, and I realize that that’s not going to happen in this day and age. So, as a result of that, I am a believer in the regional primary system. I’m not hung up on whether those regional primaries, four of them, rotate or not so that you have a chance to be earlier in the process. But while I’m for the regional primary system, I’m also a traditionalist, and I think we ought to keep the Iowa caucus first and the New Hampshire primary first and then rotate the regions if you want to do that.

Now I’m kissing up to Branstad, I can’t believe it. But seriously, I think there is something about keeping that tradition alive in American politics because it is such a part of the presidential primary fabric.

Basically that’s what I had today. But I don’t see us moving it up in Indiana until we’re actually forced to participate in one of these, I think, eventual regional primaries.

And the last thing I’ll say about the advantage of regional primaries: By consolidating those primaries into regions, you will also save the campaigns an outrageous amount of money just because you don’t have to crisscross the United States to go to all these primaries and the wacky way that they’re scheduled currently. And it would also allow the candidates and the people in those regions to actually be communicated with by these candidates by bunching them up and bringing them together because media markets do overlap to states in these regions, and it would be a very efficient way for candidates for the presidency to communicate with voters. I think they could do it over a month. If you really wanted to shorten this thing up, you could one a week for a month. That will make it crazy, but I think the American public would appreciate that.

DEAN KEN BODE: Mike, thank you very much. I don’t think either Iowa or New Hampshire are worried very much about Indiana challenging them for number one. They would each hold their events at halftime of the Super Bowl if they had to to do it first.

Okay, Bob Mulholland. California: The one that we have all looked at for so many years, and you finally made a move.

MR. BOB MULHOLLAND: Absolutely, but I’m glad to be in a city that just elected a Democratic mayor in a state that has a Bayh in the Senate and a Joe Andrew as national chair and a Robin Winston as a Democratic state chair here. I like that trend, and in California we elected a governor last year, a Democrat, by 20 points, and the trend’s even better in California.

I’ve been involved in this delegate selection process since the ‘70s, so I’ve heard all the arguments on both sides, and I think some of the earlier people in the first panel had alluded to is that the best-laid plans go astray in most cases. In California we’ve seen the same thing, where somebody lays out a plan and by the time it happens that candidate’s not even in the process anymore.

In California in 2000 will be March 7^th, which is the earliest we’ve ever had it, and so we’re the big boys now out there. From World War II to ’96, we were in June. Then finally in ‘96 we moved it to March 26^th, and we came up with a (inaudible) that we’re finally out there, that showed the United States as it really is. That’s when we were March 26^th. Now we’re March 7^th with, I guess, about 15 other states that no one will remember after they get to California.

But we became a state in 1850, and that first national convention in 1852, California had four delegates which is about 1%. New York --

DEAN KEN BODE: We should have froze it right there.

MR. BOB MULHOLLAND: That convention also had 40 ballots which hasn’t happened in a long time either. People talk about the primaries are over before the primaries, and the conventions are over before the conventions.

Finally, in 1976 California surpassed New York. We got more delegates, and we’ve never looked in the rearview mirror again. And we never will. In fact, we have over 10% of the delegates for the national convention next year, and that’s my name tag, 434 delegates, 52 congressional members. We’ve had 37 presidential elections, and California’s voted with the winner 32 times. Of course, the Republicans have sent Reagan, Nixon and Hoover from California. The Republicans have had a Californian on the national ticket 10 times. The Democrats from California have never had anyone on the national ticket. That’ll change in the next millennium. You will see Californians on the Democratic ticket a lot of times, especially with moving the primary up.

I guess Iowa and New Hampshire kind of have it fixed in their constitution practically that they’re first, and I don’t see any way of changing that. Our law basically now says that we’re the first Tuesday after the first Monday in March, so we’re at the beginning of March, and a year ago we were only one week behind New Hampshire. And these guys, because of the flexibility of these small states, we’re now five weeks behind. We’re like a supertanker, it takes us a long time to get a legislature together and get some process going.

Speaking of (inaudible), Jean Kilpatrick in 1980 who also proposed we eliminate all of the primaries, back to the smoke-filled rooms. California that would be non-smoking. We arrested the last smoker last weekend in California.

(Laughter.)

In fact, New Hampshire and Iowa, I think it’s an unwritten agreement that despite what the DNC and the RNC complains about, in reality, having Iowa/New Hampshire fixed in their law, first, it prevents the other states from going earlier. It prevents a system where we move the first primary up before the general election of the previous presidential election. So we accept that.

California’s equal to about the seventh largest economy. Many Californians sometimes wonder: Maybe we should separate from the rest of the country.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: You want to take a vote here, or --

MR. BOB MULHOLLAND: Yeah, probably, right. Our superdelegates, members of the DNC which I am myself, and members of Congress, we have 62. We have more superdelegates than about two dozen states have delegates. So already out of California Gore is way in the lead. In fact, we’ve got more superdelegates than Iowa, we’ve got more superdelegates than New Hampshire, but because they have this early system, they’re the more important ones.

Now, we now have 33 million people, 10 million of them Latinos; 30% the census will probably show next year. And I’ll predict today that the first Latino president will be a Democrat from California. And as long as Iowa or New Hampshire don’t move to October or November, you will see California playing a bigger and bigger role in the presidential race besides being the ATM machines for every candidate on both sides of the aisle.

I’ll conclude this by saying this: that California will no longer be the caboose in the presidential primaries.

DEAN KEN BODE: Okay, thank you, Bob.

Rob, you’re next, and you’re the anchorman.

MR. ROBIN WINSTON: I would just say first, thanks, Bob, for the commendation for us winning elections in Indiana. You’re always welcome to move to Indiana and vote Democratic anytime you want.

I agree with Mike, that I don’t think people would go for spending more money here on primaries, but I use the primary season as a chance to recruit; recruit primary precinct workers, recruit party workers, build our grassroots organization, and then get ready for the fall. I know that in the Gore-Bradley battle we’re not -- you’re, right, Mike, we’re not even on their top 10 list, but it’s very, very important for us to make sure that we market Indiana and say that it’s important to come here, and we will end up with probably -- we already had Bradley, and we had Tipper Gore in, and we’ll probably get the vice president in before the May primary comes around.

We use it, though, to recruit volunteers to staff those precinct places. I mean, in this county alone, Ken, there are about 900 and some precincts, 651 polling places, and we try to make sure that we staff those things.

So if we can continue to use the activism of a primary for party building, that results in us being to put more people into the field, and in the long-run being able to strengthen our party.

I agree with Mike that the rotating primary system, regional primary thing would be great. It’s very hard for us to go out and pitch Indiana. First off, they tell me that we will lose Indiana by 6:05 p.m. Election Day.

We held them out last time to like 7:10 Eastern time, and we will try to do that again next time, but the reality is, is that into the grand scheme of things we’re not a targeted state. Next time we hope to make it a little bit more of a targeted state.

The presidential primary, though, and I think we all know that at least, you know, it pales in comparison to what we’ve got to do in governors’ races, statehouse races. So when someone’s on line one talking about the Gore or Bradley campaign, you know, we’re on line two talking about the O’Bannon campaign for 2000. So that is a priority for us, and oftentimes those priorities do mix up a little bit, and we’re forced to choose between gubernatorial and presidential and oftentimes revert to choosing for gubernatorial.

But we use it as party voting, and I’m going to continue to do that, to recruit people in and staff those precincts and get out there and distribute literature. And if they want to be involved, the more conduits that people have to be involved in our party, I still believe that helps in party building.

DEAN KEN BODE: Thank you. Now, we’re finished with the panel here. I’m going to just ask one more question here. While you gather your thoughts and come to the microphones and tell us who you are, remember the subject of the panel seems to have gotten a little bit lost in the fogs of this front of the room here is why these states move to the front, why they compete to move to the front, and the strategies for doing so. So if anybody wants to try to bring these guys back to what they came to talk about, I wouldn’t mind. Anyway --

MR. BOB MULHOLLAND: Well, I made it pretty clear, eventually we’re going to elect a Democrat from California to the White House.

DEAN KEN BODE: Any you’re going to do it by moving your primary up?

MR. BOB MULHOLLAND: Absolutely.

DEAN KEN BODE: Well, let’s talk about that for a second. Which Democrat?

MR. BOB MULHOLLAND: Not this time.

DEAN KEN BODE: No, in California right now, what Democrat, assuming we’re not going to have one at the top of the ticket, what Democrat might wind up in second spot on a Gore or Bradley ticket?

MR. BOB MULHOLLAND: Well, I’m not saying that it will happen in 2000, but we have a governor, Gray Davis, who’s going to be there for another seven years, and he will be re-elected. And clearly, with an early primary and the fact that no Democrat’s ever been on the national ticket, and we are 20%, the other side of that is for November. We’re 54 electoral votes. After the next census, we’ll be 56 or 57. Right now, to win the White House is 270 electoral votes. California, one state, is 20% of that. So our agenda is to make California more important in choosing the next president.

DEAN KEN BODE: Bob, let me ask you -- oh, Les Lenkowsky.

MR. LESLIE LENKOWSKY: Les Lenkowsky, IU. To follow up on that question, putting it directly to Governor Branstad, in moving your primary up (inaudible) caucus, you were saying it’s good for the (inaudible), can you tell us briefly what has Iowa gained politically from having an early caucus. I’m trying to think what has New Hampshire gained other than John Sununu (inaudible).

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: I would say, in terms of addressing issues that Iowans care about, education and agriculture, are getting some recognition and attention in this campaign, those are very important issues to Iowans. Ethanol in particular, California’s got a real problem, they made the mistake of using MTB (phonetic), it’s now polluted their groundwater instead of using ethanol, and they’re now starting to rethink that.

And the fact that Iowa is first -- and the other thing that you’ll see, even if California, as close as it might be behind Iowa these days, doing well in the Iowa caucus can take you from being an asterisk to all of a sudden being competitive in California because of the national publicity and all the coverage that you’re going to get from doing well in Iowa and New Hampshire. So they’re small states, and the number of delegates is miniscule, but the impact -- and it’s a lot cheaper to advertise and put the organization together and do well in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, and that can then make you competitive in California and the big states.

So I think it’s not so much that we have personally put somebody into an important position in the White House or gotten some special favor, but I think it is that Iowans who are issue-oriented -- and we’re a very competitive two-party state. It’s an opportunity for those issues to be addressed. And sometimes as a result of the early attention on those issues, they become important priorities. I think that’s true on the trade issues as well. We’re a free-trade state, although on the Democratic side some of the union people might not totally agree with that. But it’s kind of interesting because both of our senators and our governor were out in Seattle for the W- --

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: Well, in fact, our governor got roughed up on the way to the meeting.

So I think that that is probably the most important thing for us, is it gives a discussion of issues that people care about, and individual people can actually ask questions of the candidates. And when it gets to big states like California, in all due respect, what happens, it’s all a media battle then. Whereas in Iowa and New Hampshire, there’s actual people that have come out, whether it’s in a living room or in a church basement or whatever and get to ask questions of the candidates. I think that’s a very healthy thing in terms of choosing the leader for our country.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: In California, a rally is three people gathered in front of a TV.

DEAN KEN BODE: You know, Governor Branstad advertises Iowa as a very competitive state. There are people in Iowa who have gone to kindergarten and graduated from college without seeing a Democratic governor in the state of Iowa when Branstad was governor; right?

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: That’s true, but look who followed me. They said that I was governor for life, but I chose to voluntarily retire. Yes, we did elect Republican governors for a long period of time, but that’s changed. And look at it, we have Senator Harkin and Senator Grassley. Iowa is a very competitive two-party state. When I first became governor, most of the congressmen were Democrats, now most of them are Republican. So it is truly a competitive two-party state in which a good candidate can do well, and I’ve always won with a lot of Democratic votes, and Vilsac (phonetic) won with a significant amount of Republican votes.

DEAN KEN BODE: Let me ask Bob Mulholland a question while we wait for the -- oh, Mitch is down here. Go ahead, Mitch.

MR. MITCH DANIELS: My question has to be for the Governor, but I hope I can inspire the others to pile on.

Governor, it bothers a lot of Americans that a minority of the population of a couple of small and unrepresentative states has such an enormous and sometimes decisive say in who the rest of us get to vote for in the fall. But let’s posit. as you just did, that it’s a good thing to make candidates compete retail, face to face, be tested in that way. Let’s just accept that for the moment. But please make the case that it’s the same two small, unrepresentative states, year after year, decade after decade who dictate the final choices for the rest of us.

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: Well, it’s tradition. Why is it the same Tuesday? Well, I think that the tradition has been built up, that’s the history, that’s the system that we have. And it is an accident of history, I guess, that it’s occurred this way. I happen to think that, although the states are not representative for the country, there is some benefit to starting in places where people take their responsibilities very seriously and where you do have a relatively high turnout compared to a lot of other places, and where retail politics and ideas are important. And as a result, I think -- I was really pleased to hear what Bob and some of the others have said, pretty much the other panel members have said they’ll leave Iowa and New Hampshire alone and go to some kind of a regional primary system after that. I don’t have any objection to that as long as -- what we just don’t like is Louisiana and some of these people try to get into it, and that I think would be bad, because they don’t have a representative system, there’s too much corruption, there’s -- well, you know the history of Louisiana, I don’t need to tell you more about that.

MR. BOB MULHOLLAND: I’ll just add that there’s legitimate criticism of Iowa and New Hampshire for being two small states where, yes, it allows candidates to have coffee at the same restaurant four days in a week. But as a Californian, we are the first state as of this year to…

(Gap in audio).

…country is going, and I don’t see -- yeah, Iowa is more so that New Hampshire, but I just don’t see any way that the parties in both these states will ever give up. It’s like musical chairs when somebody proposes the regional caucuses. Yeah, they’re musical chairs, but the two are set for Iowa and New Hampshire, they never have to get up and the rest of us have the scramble around.

So I don’t think California Democrats are going to be a part of this regional thing, because the regional thing just helps some other small states. And we’re already behind two.

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: Mitch, you asked for us to pile on a little bit, so maybe I’d cite one statistic that I looked up the other day when I knew we would be talking about the effect of the early primaries. And several people have mentioned Jimmy Carter in 1976 when he did so well in the Iowa caucuses, he got 23,373 votes. Now, a candidate for prosecutor in my home county got far more than that last fall. His name is Mike Barnes, and as the two-state chairman, though, he lost big. So that does show, I think, a comparative size of the Iowa caucus vote.

MR. MIKE McDANIEL: I’d just say about that, I have no problem with the tradition of Iowa and New Hampshire, I believe in tradition, so that’s okay with me. I do think that it’s way overstated as to the value they have in the overall big scheme of things in the overall process today versus what it was a few years ago, only from the standpoint that regardless of what the outcome is in New Hampshire in this primary, I don’t see that knocking any of those folks out of that race, because those folks who are left now are the kind of people who are going to be able to sustain themselves at least for a little while on down the process.

And let’s take the front-runners in our party right now. In New Hampshire right now it’s George W. Bush and Senator McCain, and that’s the only place in America where it’s close. Every other primary state in America, Bush has leads of three and four and some places five to one over McCain or his next closest. I think like all media today, it’s the next big event, and two weeks after that next big event because, as someone stated in an earlier panel, in our Republican primary system this year, you’re going to have primaries every week in February. So New Hampshire’s going to be, you know, if George W. Bush wins, he survived it, I think this thing will end in a big hurry. If he doesn’t win, and if he wins big in the next four or five states, what kind of effect did New Hampshire really have? You know, I mean, it’s going to be one of these things where I don’t think it has the significant impact that it used to have because of all the front-loading that has taken place. And I think it’s just another huge media event, the process has got to start somewhere, and we’re used to it starting in Iowa and New Hampshire.

DEAN KEN BODE: I remember, Mike and Governor Branstad, and the rest of the panel, when the conservative Democratic state legislators in the Super Tuesday -- what became the Super Tuesday, southern states, decided in 1984 that they wanted to begin to have a regional primary in the South. And the reasons they said they wanted to do that was that Iowa and New Hampshire had too much influence, first of all, Iowa in particular. These were Democrats, remember; in those days the Democrats controlled the state legislatures of the South. The Democrats in Iowa were far too liberal, and they were inflicting upon the party nominees like George McGovern. So they decided to try to move a series of states to the South. And they did, they succeeded.

Then Gary Hart came -- they also said they wanted, whoever the nominee was, to be familiar with the views of Democrats in that region, be familiar with those states, because all they were doing is campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire in the early invisible primary days. So they’d succeeded, and then Gary Hart won New Hampshire that year. And he blew into the South, and there was a period of time of about 10 or 12 days of campaigning in the South, and they really wanted a more conservative candidate even than Hart. They were not interested in Mondale at that point. They more interested in moving that primary, they were interested in John Glenn who was a candidate that year.

And after it was all over with, I had an opportunity to sit down with Gary Hart, and I said to him, "How did it work? Did you really get around the South for Super Tuesday and really get to know the Democrats of the South and hear their views, and did you absorb some of the South the way you did New Hampshire and Iowa?" And he said, "Bode, all I did was go to airport tarmacs and TV studios and boardrooms where I could meet with people for money." He says, "I don’t have a clue what even happened in these two weeks, it was such a blur to me."

So moving it up doesn’t always work.

MR. ROBIN WINSTON: Well, also moving it up resulted in Jesse Jackson winning a lot of the Super Tuesday primaries, and all of sudden he wasn’t regarded as being reflective of the South. I mean, he carried some big states down there.

DEAN KEN BODE: You know, Rob, that’s very interesting, because I also talked to Jesse Jackson that year. And I said, "What effect do you think this is going to have on you?" And he said, "Well, Bode, we’re going to teach them how to count. Because," he said, "at this moment more than 50% of all African-Americans live in the Super Tuesday states." That was something that the architects of Super Tuesday in those southern state legislatures forgot to figure out.

MR. ROBIN WINSTON: And once he won, all of a sudden we abandon the Super Tuesday primary. So that was kind of a side benefit of that. I hope that we do regional, though, you’re right, Governor, we’re not going to be able to move Iowa. You guys are going to keep moving it, it will be after Christmas next time. We will have to adjust it. You asked our basic question: Why do they do it? They do it because it brings notoriety to their state, lots of money, lots of media, and all of sudden everybody in every town, hamlet and whatever community in New Hampshire or Iowa’s important. And just like you said Jesse said, he taught them how to count, the Gore tracking, the Bradley tracking, these folks are tracking all these folks, you know, town council people, the most important people in the state there.

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: Robin, you’re right about that. I was watching C-SPAN this summer and, you know, you get to see all your friends from all over the state of Iowa on these little -- they cover the road to the White House and they’re covering the different candidates, and so that has given a lot of people some attention. And obviously once we got to that situation, Iowans on a bipartisan basis are very united in keeping that. That’s one thing that I think they’re strongly committed to.

But I do think that we need to continue to look at this front-loading and all of the states that have moved up. And I know the effort on the Republican side was to reward states like Indiana that didn’t by giving them more delegates. But I don’t know that a number --

MR. ROBIN WINSTON: Didn’t work.

GOVERNOR TERRY BRANSTAD: It didn’t work, no. I don’t think enough states bought that because it doesn’t matter how many delegates you have if it’s already decided before the convention ever comes around.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, my name is Johnnie Warren (phonetic), I’m a student at Wabash College. My question is: With Indiana having such a late primary in May and Republican candidates for president paying so little attention to our state, and national Republican leaders, do you think this is having a negative effect on Republican politics in the state of Indiana? With Indiana having a Democratic governor going on 12 years now, and Democrats being elected to the mayor’s office in the two largest cities in the state, do you think this being ignored by the National Republican Party is having a bad effect on Republican Party politics in Indiana?

MR. MIKE McDANIEL: Well, I don’t think there’s a correlation between presidential politics and those individual kind of races. I mean, you have to look at each individual race and each individual year. And I know there’s always attempts to kind of lump them together, but my experience in this business, and I’ve been involved in it since 1974, is that each year’s different, each campaign has a different persona.

Believe me, people in Indiana are paying attention to what’s going on in presidential politics. Because more times than not, especially in a presidential year, that’s what gets them to the polls more so than the gubernatorial races and the senatorial race. I hate to admit that, but the fact is that that is true. So it’s not like they’re not paying attention.

In my case, I’m excited about the fact that this thing may be over in early March this time, because I’m hosting the Republican National State Chairmen’s Meeting here in May, and my goal is to get our nominee here some 60 days before the national convention to work with the state chairmen from all over the country. And believe me, there’s no reason for a Republican presidential nominee to come to Indiana, because of where we are on the food chain and electoral votewise and other reasons. And so I’ve at least got a built-in excuse to get him here once during the course of the campaign, I think. And if I can parlay that, that would be a rallying point.

But I don’t think in the big scheme of things that there’s a big connection between previous elections at other levels with the lack of attention of us being a primary state, I just don’t think there’s a connection.

DEAN KEN BODE: Mike, are you saying basically that Indiana is pretty much sewn up for the Republicans in the upcoming presidential race?

MR. MIKE McDANIEL: Well, I believe that -- look at it this way: We’ve not lost a Republican presidential nominee in Indiana since 1964, and that was, of course, the year that Lyndon Johnson ran after President Kennedy was assassinated.

Bob Dole won Indiana. Bob Dole won Marion County by 9,000 votes. If George W. Bush is our nominee, and I personally think he probably will be, I believe that he’s going to run much better in Indiana than Bob Dole ran in Indiana in 1996. So I think that it is going to be a good year for us because I think he is going to generate a lot of interest and run very, very well in Indiana.

DEAN KEN BODE: Mike, right after New Hampshire and Gore beats Bradley unexpectedly two to one, the next morning he rolls over in bed and he whispers in Tipper’s ear, he says, "Tipper, it’s gonna be Evan." What effect does that have on your projection?

MR. MIKE McDANIEL: Well, that’ll be interesting. I’m kind of torn on that one. Nothing would be more fun for me than to beat him in a statewide election. Believe me, I’m the poster child for that.

(Laughter.)

But the other side of it says, you know, I don’t know why Evan Bayh would want to be the, you know, the deputy captain of the Titanic. And I’m not quite sure -- if I were Evan Bayh, I would go on vacation two weeks before the Democrat National Convention and leave my cell phone at home.

DEAN KEN BODE: I just watched Rob Winston move his microphone into position.

(Laughter.)

MR. MIKE McDANIEL: Seriously, because I’m not quite sure what it gets him, because Al Gore is not going to run well in Indiana. I mean, he’s got more baggage than American Tourister. And all we got to do is recite to all the UAW workers in this state copies of his own book, Earth in the Balance, and that’ll be the end of him here. So, you know, I mean, we have a great chance next year with George Bush, if he is our nominee at the top of the ticket. So if you want help paying for Al Gore to come to Indiana for a visit, I might chip in some.

MR. ROBIN WINSTON: Mike, there you go again.

MR. MIKE McDANIEL: Well, after that shot that I took in the introduction from your colleague here, I had to come up with something like that.

MR. ROBIN WINSTON: Ken, you know, it’s early. Once upon a time there was a guy named Bush that had 91% approval rating, he’d won the Persian Gulf War. Along came a guy from Arkansas and weird things happened, and we ended up with Bush being defeated for president.

MR. ROBIN WINSTON: Now, wait, let me finish. A great economy and peace time in Northern Ireland. And weird things continue to happen. The reality is is that, you know, it’s early, Mike. And you never know what could happen in this business.

Evan Bayh would be a big benefit for us. Ask all the people that ran for statehouse in ’98 with the Bayh/Harrel, the Bayh/Adams yard signs. I mean, they’ll tell you Bayh/Mahern, Bayh/Barden, whatever they were, they were very, very beneficial to us, generates interest. The UAW members that you’re concerned about, you know, that I just left their meeting and why I was late, I don’t think you have to worry about where they stand for Al Gore. I think that you’ll find that they’ll be supportive of the Vice President.

MR. MIKE MULHOLLAND: Yeah, Mike, you sound a little bit like the Newt Gingrich crowd prior to the ’96 presidential race.

DEAN KEN BODE: All right, let’s move to the audience. Jim Barnes.

MR. JIM BARNES: Yes, I was interested to hear both of the Indiana state party chairs endorse the idea of a rotating regional primary system. I would like to know from Mr. Mulholland whether he thinks that California could accept a role in a regional rotating primary system. And then I’d like Mr. Winston and Mr. McDaniel to briefly share with us what they think the sentiment is of their colleagues, their other state party chairs, about adopting a regional primary system.

MR. MIKE MULHOLLAND: Yeah, as I said earlier, California is not interested in being the caboose anymore in presidential primaries, and the only states that benefit from regional are the states that are small and are not Iowa/New Hampshire. So our secretary of state, who is one of the only two Republicans in the state of California is pushing this idea, but he’s going to be gone in two years and he has no power.

MR. MIKE McDANIEL: I think eventually, if this happens, Indiana will be -- if there really is an honest debate about this process, I think Indiana will be ready to move into a regional primary system eventually, I still think we’re a long way aways from it. But at least as far as my colleagues on the national committee are concerned, the ones that I have talked with about this, have indicated to me that most of them like the idea of regional primaries.

Now, Chairman Nicholson, National Chairman Nicholson, who you’re going to hear from at lunch, has put together a task force to look into this. He’s actually trying to do something about this and has been for a while.

But I think there’s a lot of interest out there because I think a lot of states are tired of being fly-over states in this process. And they want to have at least the candidates try to communicate with them. And so I think there is interest in doing that.

MR. ROBIN WINSTON: I think there’d be interest on our part. I talked to the Ohio chair and the Michigan chair. I mean, we’re in the battleground part of the country, in the Midwest, we’re right in the middle of it, yet candidates fly over it to Illinois, they fly to Ohio. Some even go down to Kentucky, they go to Michigan. We would be very, very interested in participating in a rotating system by region.

DEAN KEN BODE: Our last question before lunch.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m (inaudible) Dellamor (phonetic), I’m a student at IU Law School in here our very own SPEA which helped sponsor this.

Doesn’t the front-loaded system encourage party implosion and

back-biting by encouraging candidates to specifically attack initial

front-runners which subsequently leads them to vulnerability in a presidential election?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I was going to say: You know, people always talk about politics as this (inaudible), but Pizza Hut attacks Papa Murphy’s. And most American politics is driven by the private sector, and American business constantly attacks the others in ads. The

front-loading definitely helps a front-runner. That’s accepted.

The Republicans have a front-runner for two reasons: One is it’s a weak bench, and the second reason is they’re so desperate to get an invitation to the White House again.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: We certainly saw in the debate last night that there is a tendency of everybody to try to gang up on the front-runner and to attack. And I suppose that’s going to happen at any stage whenever the primaries are held and whenever the first debates are held, but yes, when there’s a front-runner, all of the other contenders are going to go on the attack.

MR. MIKE McDANIEL: Well, first of all, I didn’t hear any attacks last night. How many of you watched the debate last night? Okay. About a fifth of the room, maybe. I did because I was eager to see them all perform in that kind of a setting. But first of all, they didn’t attack each other.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Even Forbes?

MR. MIKE McDANIEL: Well, Forbes tried to stick a needle every chance he had and every answer he had, but if you listened to what they were talking about, they were talking about the issues. There weren’t any personal attacks in that debate last night. I have no problem with people going after each other if they’re talking about how we’re going to give the money back to the people of the United States, which was what that whole debate was about last night. Everybody there are on the same page of what they want to do, they just differ in how you’re going to do it.

So, you know, I mean, as far as I’m concerned, that was the first of many over the course of this campaign, and the media always likes to call them attacks and barbs and all this kind of stuff. I thought it was relatively tame. But the one thing that it said to me, in complete disagreement with my colleague from California, is that it showed how strong we actually are. And there were at least -- I shouldn’t say this publicly -- but there were four of those six that I think could be President of the United States tomorrow and do a great job. I happen to be for one of them more than the others, but, you know, clearly it showed that it is a deep bench, and they really did spend some serious time talking about some pretty good issues that I think America cares about.

So I think a lot of this media hype about who won, who lost, whether they were still standing, whether they embarrassed themselves continues to trivialize the system as opposed to putting this in a situation where people are actually listening to what these people are saying about issues.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: In some respects, I think it’s okay for there to be the primary battles. I think that it helps build your party. You know, you move the calendar way forward here in Indiana, a Gore organization that might have been dormant, and because we’re not a contested state in their eyes or in other people’s eyes may not have moved as far as forward as they have now. They’re already up and running in the state. Bradley people are up and running in the state. Sure, there’s going to be a little bit of divisiveness, but I think in the final analysis, I think moving it a little bit early and getting their organizations in place in the long-term will behoove both their campaigns. So I don’t see it as a downside.

What happens, though, is that people are raising a record amounts of money way in advance. And that’s one issue that impacts these things probably more than anything else.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Another thing is there’s a danger of attacking too much. And I think this is the thing that Forbes, because of what he did four years, is facing a backlash in New Hampshire and in Iowa because people remember that he really savaged Bob Dole. And that hurt Bob Dole, Bob Dole went from an 80% approval rating in Iowa down to about 50% as a result of that. And so Forbes has been a little more careful in this go-around. And I think that that’s probably good. I think that, you know, negative -- there’s a tendency, obviously, to go after the front-runner because if you’re going to win, you’ve got to surpass the front-runner.

But I think the American people are sick and tired of personal attacks. And so it’s one thing to show differences on the issues, personal attacks I think can backfire and oftentimes do backfire today. So I think the candidates that choose that route have got to be very, very careful because it may well hurt them as much or more than the person they attack.

DEAN KEN BODE: We have one more question over here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, my name is Kip Chase, I’m from Wabash College. I like to ask the panel: You know, in the ‘90s the Democrats have been very successful with the so-called new Democrats as far as Clinton, Evan Bayh, and even here at the local level with Peterson. What we see now is with the Democratic presidential race with Gore and Bradley, they seem to be more old Democrats, on the left. The front-loading process, has that pushed them more that side, or what’s your view with those two as far as the New Hampshire and the Iowa caucuses?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Give me that mike, I paid for it. Actually, the Republican Party’s policies are a lot like their grandfathers, and the Democratic Party is the new millennium just on the issues of choice, guns, the environment and public education. So Gore and Bradley represent the new kind of Democrat. As President Clinton said in 1992, "I’m a new kind of Democrat," and I think that’s who you’ll see get the nomination, either Bradley or Gore. I’m a Gore person myself.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I think that was a very perceptive question, because I think that’s exactly what’s happening. As I said a minute ago, the Republicans last night, for those of you who watched the debate were arguing over how to give the money back. And what you see now in the Democrat primary between Gore and Bradley is to try to outbid each other to see how many parts of their natural liberal constituency they could buy back to win the nomination. And I think that’s exactly what’s happened. I think that’s an excellent question.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: There was a time that Gore said, "The Democrats in Iowa were unrepresented." But he has abandoned that position and has now really fully embraced all of the -- kind of the liberal elements of the Democratic Party. And, of course, he’s fighting with Bradley over who’s going to get those votes. And so I think it has actually, in terms of general election, it’s probably not been good for the Democrats’ efforts to try to win the middle when you’ve had this kind of a battle.

And, in fact, Bradley -- I think a lot of people also thought that Bradley might try to be a more of a centrist candidate. He made a strategic decision to try to go at Gore from the left. And consequently -- and maybe that’s because of the Iowan Democrats, I don’t know, but that is the phenomenon that I see, and I think that that probably bodes well for Republicans to win the presidential election, because they’re better positioned to win the middle which is where the elections are always decided.

DEAN KEN BODE: You want to make the last final wrap-up comment on that particular matter?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Yeah, I just don’t think -- I mean, I remember many Republican candidates worrying about the Manchester Union Leader’s endorsement and whether or not Loeb or Loeb or however you said his last name, was supportive of them. I also know that everybody’s talking about "We can’t wait to get to South Carolina, where there are a lot of veterans who will be supporting McCain, conservative Southerners that will be a group they have to go after." So I don’t know that it’s necessarily that our party’s moved there, everybody -- you know you got Bauer still running around, you’ve got a lot of people in their race that are trying to assuage the concerns of the conservatives. And the real battleground that everybody’s talking about is, is George Bush perceived as being too liberal or too left of center or too moderate for his own party, and will they pick up a more conservative person to run with him for vice president, and is he going to tailor his views to those concerns.

You know, everything I’ve read about McCain going to South Carolina is that, you know, he’ll do well there because of the large military veteran population which is conservative and those things. So obviously they’re participating in their primary also.

DEAN KEN BODE: Okay. Our lunch is about to be served. Before we go, let me remind you that just outside the door will be Gordon Durnil and his new book, Throwing Chairs and Raising Hell: Politics in the Bulen Era. You can pick up a copy of the book outside either just before lunch or just after lunch. The book, in addition to having Gordon Durnil’s take on the history of the Bulen Era, also has a large number of pictures of notable Republicans in the 1970s. So if you want to see what neckties looked like on Keith Bulen, John Mutz, Dick Lugar and Gordon Durnil himself in that era, and some of the hairstyles, they’re here for you.

Thank you very much, we’ll see you at lunch.

(A lunch break was taken.)

(Gap in audio.)

DEAN KEN BODE: …voting participation in every election because they make you vote. You have to vote in Costa Rica. And if you don’t vote, you have to pay a fine of about $15.00 which is a tidy sum of money in a small country like that. Still, after every election, there’s a line outside the central election tribunal the next morning of people who are lined up to pay the $15.00 to get it on record that they wouldn’t vote for either one of those bums.

All right, our panel this afternoon is basically how do you cover, as a journalist, the front-loaded system? We have three panelists, two of whom could be considered journalists, one a resident critic of journalism presently visiting at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. I will introduce him first: He’s John Mutz, Indiana’s former Lieutenant Governor, a terrific addition to our school of journalism at Northwestern for this quarter which he’s just wrapping up at the present time. John’s been extremely helpful to us there. As you know, he’s also been the president of PSI Energy and the head of the Lilly Endowment here in Indiana as well as being lieutenant governor and state senator and so forth. John will be our third speaker.

Our second speaker will be Brian Howey, the publisher of The Howey Political Report and the news editor of Nuvo news weekly in Indianapolis. His weekly column is carried by 25 daily newspapers in the state. He’s a long-time political writer in Indiana and knows the state very well.

Our lead-off speaker will be Walter Shapiro. Walter Shapiro from USA Today is covering his sixth presidential campaign. His column appears twice weekly, including today on the debate that he observed last night in the Republican Party, in USA Today coast to coast. He spent most of President Clinton’s first term writing for Esquire magazine, a column called "Our Man in the White House." That was Walter, that was not Bill. And he has also written for Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Washington Monthly, and Congressional Quarterly.

So let me lead off by introducing Walter Shapiro.

MR. WALTER SHAPIRO: Thanks so much, Ken. First of all, by that resume, clearly I'm a man who, like Arthur Goldberg who used run for Governor of New York, by reciting his long resume, and finally some hecklers shouted out, "Whatsa matter, Arthur, you can’t hold a job?"

As a political columnist and somebody who -- I spend an awful lot of my time going to New Hampshire and Iowa this time of year. And I ask myself as I do every four years a series of questions like: Why do we choose our presidents in states with the ethnic composition of the cast of Baywatch? Why am I doomed to follow the candidates and fly into airports so small that they dream of being a regional hub for ValuJet? Why am I condemned to follow the candidates into motels and hotels so bad they steal my soap? And this is really a serious question for all of us as Americans. Why do we pick our presidents in states where any meal ordered after 7 p.m. is called breakfast?

Now, talking as a member of the political journalistic class, we have done something breathtakingly stupid for our own narrow self-interest. We have discredited the wonderful state of Louisiana which wanted to hold a meaningful presidential caucus. Okay, it’s crooked. But as a reporter, would I rather spend January in New Orleans or Des Moines? You make the call.

On a serious basis. What I really hope that comes out of this round a Republican contest is -- that we at least raise South Carolina to the level achieved by Iowa and New Hampshire. What I like about South Carolina, particularly on the Democratic side, is while it does not have Latinos, it has a very large minority population. And I think it is so important to add an early state which requires saturation living room kind of campaigning with a minority population. The nice thing about South Carolina, is again like New Hampshire, it’s geographically compact. So that is my serious reform proposal.

My goal, and I think as somebody tries to explain this process, I think the most important thing going is deliberation for the voters. I think it is so important to be able to see the candidates at a point when you’re discussing them with people in the car, you’re discussing them over the barbecue at weekends, you’re discussing them at the office, as opposed to being handed a regional primary, zoom, zoom, you get a few ads, you mention it -- you talk about it for two days, you vote, and then you’re handed a fait accompli choice.

What I really see as happening -- and I know many of the party chairmen and many people will say this all happened accidentally. But in the Agatha Christie Who Benefits and What’s Going on Here School of Looking at the Front-Loading System, what have we achieved? We have achieved that in all likelihood, by the second week of March, both parties will have chosen their nominees, and -- and it’s a big and -- the soft money ad blitz, the like of which America has never seen will begin the next week.

There is only one reason for having nominees certified in March as opposed to June, and that is until there is a contest or increasingly corrupt political parties have not figured out a way – until there is a de facto nominee or increasingly corrupt political parties have not figured out a way of spending soft money on total saturation ad campaigns.

I think what the system also reflects is while not guaranteeing an outcome, it came pretty close to guaranteeing an outcome, at least when it was envisioned by the party leaders who took no steps to either use jawboning or any other inducement on the Democratic side to change the rush to front-loading, and that is that it was going to give the American people an election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, two candidates who take direction from their consultants exceedingly well.

And a third aspect to the system is the fact that what it would do by having our parties choose their nominees by mid March is that it would eliminate, squeeze out, one more area of spontaneity out of our politics. We have already denatured the party conventions so no one is ever off message, and as a consequence no one ever watches the conventions anymore. And now we’re trying to denature the whole presidential selection process.

And were it not for Bill Bradley, and were it not for a spunky showing, although probably doomed by John McCain, the leaders of both parties would have gotten the perfect nomination situation that they desired.

Now, I know time is short, but I just want to stress that in all of this, my profession, working journalists, the guys on the bus, the girls on the bus, are so complicit, it’s embarrassing.

Let me just go down a very quick roster of sins. In 1997 when the Democratic Party could have passed rules to change the effects of

front-loading, and the Republican Party could have used the jaw-boning effect, and the fact that you had something like 30-odd Republican governors, virtually no one in the United States, not in all the political coverage discussed this matter. So at the point when it was possible to change this crazed system, a system that destroys deliberation, the press was totally silent.

Number two, and this is the thing that is such an affront to all of us, why did some interesting candidates like John Kasich drop out of the Republican race? Less because of front-loading, but because of the immense attention that my colleagues in the press gave to a bastard event called the Iowa straw poll. An event that predicts nothing, had absolutely no value except to raise money, to show that Steve Forbes could spend money, and that the Iowa Republican Party -- I wish Terry Branstad were still here -- could raise it.

As a result, we had this entire ludicrous, over-produced spectacle in August, a year before the party conventions which was designed to winnow out candidates.

In whose interest was the winnowing? Certainly not mine as a reporter, certainly not yours as voters, but the press was an enthusiastic participant with very little skepticism.

And third thing, and I’ll end on this note, is the torrent of polls, particularly early polls that are virtually meaningless, that dictate nominees or suggest nominees and create bandwagon effects is a very serious offense that we’re all guilty of.

While I don’t have the exact citations, a year ago the press was running polls every week that showed a person by the name of George W. Bush, or George Bush, leading the pack for the Republican nomination. Unclear at that point is exactly how many people who said Bush was their favorite thought he also won the Gulf War. But the point is that that created an early bandwagon effect for Bush -- which the press then corrected their polls to avoid misunderstanding by identifying the Texas governor in other ways. But at that point, the early bandwagon effect helped Bush raise his record amounts of money, so now we could say he was a front-runner not because of the evanescent polls, he was a

front-runner because of the vast war chest he had raised.

Yes, George W. Bush would have been a formidable candidate even if there had been no polls. And yes, he probably would have raised a lot of the money, but we in the press certainly didn’t make it any easier for them.

I’ll just end with an observation right now, that the only state I would take polls at all seriously in is New Hampshire, because there are only two states in which voters are paying attention: New Hampshire and Iowa. And in Iowa, it is very hard to predict from the polls who is actually going to attend the caucuses, because on the Democratic side, there has not been a meaningful Iowa caucus since 1988. So, I will just end that it is a terrible system, and the politicians have created it in their hands, and we in the press have contributed to it massively. Thank you.

DEAN KEN BODE: Now, let me ask you, Walter, you say that we have denatured the party conventions and denatured the selection process. Would you tell us what you mean by the term "denatured"?

MR. WALTER SHAPIRO: Oh, I think made eunuch-like, eunuchesque, desexed, neutered.

(Laughter.)

DEAN KEN BODE: Thank you, Walter. We go to Brian Howey.

MR. BRIAN HOWEY: I want confine my remarks through the prism of the Lugar presidential campaign in 1996 which is the only one that I was on the road to cover. I do have to make one reference point to the first Bulen Symposium a year ago. An old Indiana University colleague of mine, Mike Tackett (phonetic), who writes for The Chicago Tribune, was here, and we had an opportunity to have lunch. And then when he was on, I think, this very panel, the panel after lunch, he kind of ribbed me gently a little bit by saying that I was about the only person that was talking about the impeachment process having any legs. And, of course, we’ve since seen that that was a dramatic story to begin this year.

I want to give you a couple -- I went through some of my 1996 notes. Dateline: Milford, New Hampshire, pulling into the town square to see a torch light parade for the Republican front-runner. I hear this eerie rumbling on the road, and I look in the windshield before me and I see it’s very smooth pavement, realizing that I had a flat tire. And somebody from one of Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork brigades passed by, and I heard him say, "Looks like Bob Dole." And how prophetic that was, because once I was able to wheel my car into a Shell station on the very scenic town square where Dole was up on the steps of a church with a bell that had been created by Paul Revere, I heard Bob Dole talk about how he simply didn’t realize the jobs and the economy were a major issue. And this was a couple of days after Pat Buchanan had unleashed his pitchfork brigade.

And there’s a real detachment there, that here we had the

front-runner who didn’t really seem to know what was moving the people in New Hampshire and, of course, Buchanan gave him a very real race.

Further detachment: Muscatine, Iowa. I rendezvoused with the Lugar campaign in this Mississippi River town, a sleepy little hotel where they were going to have a rally sparsely attended. And I was told that I could have a little access with the candidate and his wife. So I went up about four floors, where I saw Richard Lugar and his wife, Char, waiting for the event. And I’ve known Richard Lugar for a long time. I’ve thought that he’s a man of deep thought and has a lot to offer the process, and I had heard him say repeatedly during the 1996 campaign that "This is an entertainment hour." And, of course, some of our speakers this morning talked about the celebrity status and everything.

Lugar was mad this day, and it’s the first time I’d ever seen him mad. I mean, he was -- I wouldn’t say fuming, but he was not a pleasant person this afternoon. Who was the object of his agitation? It was David Yepsen, who is the fine political reporter for The Des Moines Register. And his complaint with David Yepsen was simply he saw him as a primary gatekeeper. And as long as Yepsen was writing stories about how Lugar was not raising money, and there was Lugar wallowing in about 3- to 4% in all the polls in Iowa, he really knew that he had no chance.

Dateline: Des Moines, Iowa, a few days later. We were brought to Richard Lugar’s campaign headquarters, a very small office in some kind of a strip mall there. And we were given a photo op and an opportunity to watch this senator, this proud senator, who was escorted into a room, an office, with a couple of phones and there was a window, and some members of the national press and some of us from the Indiana press were standing there, and we were given the opportunity to watch Dick Lugar make fund-raising calls. And for the next hour and half to two hours, he sat there and made one phone call after another. And that underscored, to me, the undignified part of this process, that here is a man who could have been out pressing the flesh -- although Donald Trump wouldn’t want to do that -- who could have been revealing his ideas, and he had many of them that I thought were relevant, and yet here he was having to make phone call after phone call raising money. And I think that’s a sad status.

What we’ve seen this year is like, I think, further audacity and perversity of the entire system, where it’s become the 64 million-dollar question. Right before the process really got under way, here was George W. Bush who had raised $30 million, 35 million, on the way to -- I think it’s probably up to about 64 million, let’s say that’s the case right now -- it’s the 64 million-dollar question. It’s the invisible primary he’s obviously won.

And the other thing that we’ve touched upon, and I’m not going to spend too much time on this, is simply the 25-dollar vote event in Ames, Iowa. I originally had it as a cow barn where it took place. I guess it was on the campus of Iowa State University.

But yeah, this knocked out Dan Quayle, a former Vice President of the United States; Elizabeth Dole, who was an incredibly credible candidate, who headed up the American Red Cross. And I don’t even think that she realized the significance that the Iowa -- Ames Straw Poll had taken.

When we were covering the Lugar campaign in ’96, it was kind of a parallel event. something that was there to occupy the fancy and the scattered interest of the national media. By this year, 1999, it was knocking candidates out. And here Liddy Dole, I believe, finished third, and she went on vacation for two weeks. That suggested to me that she didn’t even realize the importance of this event.

And I want to part with a couple of thoughts, here. I hear this all around the Indiana General Assembly quite a bit, "Democracy is sausage making. It’s not a real pretty process." And sometimes we see it the white heat of the media glare; with all its flaws, it still tastes pretty good. It’s probably the best system in the world for all it flaws.

And I do want to make one closing remark concerning this very flawed system and some of the remarks made earlier this morning about the Clinton candidacy and how he may not have been a first-tier candidate. I had an opportunity to have a phone conversation with Keith Bulen a few weeks before he passed on, and one of the last things I asked him, "You know, what do you think about Bill Clinton?" And his comment to me was, "Best candidate I ever saw, heard or dreamed of." And hearing that from a pro was really quite revealing.

Thanks.

DEAN KEN BODE: Okay. Let’s go on to John Mutz who comes at this from a perspective, I guess, in terms of coverage as a virgin. He’s never been a journalist.

MR. JOHN MUTZ: That’s an interesting way to introduce me, Ken.

My role, as I see it here, is to take a few steps back, question whether or not the cynicism that clearly exists in America today about its political system could in fact be alleviated or the situation improved by a reform in this area or reform in others. And in doing that, I guess my view of this is that I don’t know enough about the in-detail thinking of the quote, "average American," to determine that. So I have to rely on the researchers in the communication research field to give me some advice. And so I do that by looking at people by Kathleen Hall Jamieson at the Annenburg Center, Daniel Ankolovich (phonetic), the noted pollster and researcher, and a number of other researchers in this category. There are a lot of good pieces of work being done in this category.

And what I find is this: that most of them find that the cynicism level cannot be totally related to any one influencing factor, front-loading primaries, etc. But nearly all of them reached a conclusion that one of major culprits in the situation is the way we cover elections in America today.

Now, having said that, then the question is: What are things that reporters do today in covering elections which lead to that cynicism? And the four things that stand out in the work of all of the authors that I’ve noted here and I’ve read, are these: First of all, we tend to overemphasize the importance of the race horse phenomena in covering a campaign. Now, some people would suggest to you, "Well, it’s easier to write about that, you get the poll results and you write them up, than it is to write about other things in a campaign." The thoughtful reporters I know do a great deal more than that, and I would suggest that my colleagues on this platform certainly do a great deal more than that. But, nevertheless, that is the first criticism, that we tend to relegate this issue as a horse race, and the horse race can be what does the recent poll show and what do the recent fund-raising reports show when, in fact, there may be some other more important things to write about.

The second issue that these researchers show in their work is our tendency to want to emphasize the importance of money in campaigns. Now, I‘m one of those who is a critic of the enormous amount of money that flows in and out of campaigns today. There’s no question about that. But again, this is the item that tends to be moving people toward sarcasm and cynicism about our system, and that is only those with money have anything to say.

And then the third issue that is raised is one we already talked about, and that’s the tendency of many writers to write a good deal more about the celebrity than about the substance of an individual. The celebrity being a phenomenon that is largely created, I believe, by electronic media in our world today.

I happen to remember what it was like, oh, about six years ago -- and mind you, I have not been an elected official for a long time nor a campaigner nor on television on a regular basis. I ran into a woman in a local department store here in Indianapolis, and she says, "I think I know you." And I said, "Well, I doubt if you do, my name’s John Mutz" and so forth. And she said, "No, no, you’ve been in my living room." And I said, "No, no, no, I’m sure I really haven’t been in your living room." And she said, "Yes, you have."

Well, of course, as we continued the conversation, I had been on in her living room night after night as a political candidate on 30-second commercials and as an officeholder here in Indiana repeatedly during a period of time, maybe as many as six out of every eight days. She thought I was in her home, psychologically speaking. So we create celebrities through this electronic medium that’s available to us, and then we write everything we can find about them.

Last night I watched the coverage of the Forbes campaign. To be sure it was on a channel not noted for it’s political coverage, but the subject of the coverage was, in fact, what did he eat during the campaign day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I mean, I think that’s interesting information, and funny, it was meant to be funny, it was a humorous --

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: The Food Channel?

MR. JOHN MUTZ: No, it wasn’t the Food Channel, it was The Comedy Channel, but that was, nevertheless, the…

So the point I’m making, of course, is that we’ve found a great deal of fun and enjoyment in dealing with what do celebrities do. And, of course, our campaigners, our candidates, become celebrities.

And this celebrity nature is one of the most frequent criticisms that’s mouthed into all these various studies that I’ve been referring to, I think primarily because what the American public is perceiving here is that they really do at some level want substance; not just image, but want substance.

In fact, in The Reasoning Voter, another one of these texts, the conclusion is that ultimately if you give somebody enough exposure, real substance becomes known. It takes awhile, it takes a long time in some cases. So, that that’s the third issue.

The fourth issue is the issue of reporting motives, the idea being that when we report in a campaign and a person makes a policy statement, it is not enough for us to say, "Candidate X today advocated a major welfare reform program." It is then necessary for us to say why he or she is advocating that, and the why is related to their own self interest. This is motive reporting and has become more and more common as we look at the political process that we’re dealing with.

Now, those four items, or what this (inaudible) research shows there

-- it’s certainly more complicated than I’ve made it in these remarks. But I guess my view about this is that until we find a willingness to do the kind of reporting that celebrates two issues. Now, I’m a policy wonk, I admit that. I am turned on by new ideas, by different approaches to how we solve human problems. And I love the interplay of those ideas. And the second

part I love is the relationships that you have to build to make something happen around those ideas. Those are the things we ought to be celebrating in American political life.

I’m astounded when my former classmate at Northwestern University, Warren Beatty, is considered even by somebody a candidate for President of the United States. You know, I know Warren.

(Laughter.)

I used to drink beer with him when I was in college.

And by the same point, I think of Donald Trump. Now, Donald Trump may be an astute businessman, but Donald Trump does one thing extremely well, and that is increase the amount of attention and publicity that Donald Trump gets. And I’m convinced that that’s what this is all about. I do not believe Donald Trump had even a whimsical notion that he wants to be President of the United States. Maybe he does, and I would be surprised. But my point is that it is our tendency now to cover this sort of stuff when, in fact, it seems to be the policy questions and the relationships necessary to make them real should be the major focus of what we’re about.

I have to say, finally, that I think the movement toward direct primaries, whether it be for the U.S. Senate, whether it be for the presidency of the United States is, in my opinion, populism gone astray. I do not believe that anybody in their fondest dreams in the early days of our republic believed that we should make decisions of this importance by popular vote. That may sound like an astounding thing for someone who’s a politician on this platform to say. I don’t believe, for example, that the term of Supreme Court nominees should be determined by whether or not you’ve got a record that’s easy to defend or no record at all. You know, I think the founding fathers actually thought the Senate Judiciary Committee and the President would get together and talk over candidates. Can you imagine that happening?

So, it seems to me that I have to get those comments in and on the record here today, because it does seem to me that until we decide that referenda and similar kinds of policy-making methods are not in the best interest of this republic, I doubt if we’re going to do much about changing the system we’ve been talking about today. And I would suggest to you that as a result, we better let the public market work its will.

DEAN KEN BODE: Thank you, John. Can I ask you a question just leading out of the last final remarks that you had there. There are 18 or so percent of the Democratic delegates at the present time that are called superdelegates. They’re automatic delegates to the Democratic convention. They are the party people, if you will, those folks who are not subject to being elected by these dreaded primaries that you’ve been talking about here, this dose of populism. About 98% of them are for Al Gore. Would you guess that the reason they are for Al Gore is that they have carefully deliberated his positions on issues and made that kind of a choice, or is there something else at work here that is mysterious and below the surface?

MR. JOHN MUTZ: Let’s clarify a couple of things. When it comes to picking a candidate, issues may be important among the party faithful, but picking the quality of the human being is what that’s about. Ken, it seems to me that when we evaluate a person for enormous responsibility, what we want to know a lot about is his character, about his background, about his history, all those sorts of things. Now, when we get in the position we’re going to hire somebody to run our family business, we certainly don’t go out and take a poll, who is the best guy to run my family business? What we do is we want to get to know intimately and personally the person we want to do that job. This is important to us. We entrust that particular asset to these people. And so it’s under that set of circumstances that -- my experience, for example, back when we did everything in Indiana by state convention. The party bosses, as you would call them, really got to know us. I’ve been on that trail, I’ve been through several campaigns in which I was the subject of their inquire, and they were not looking at my position on welfare reform or all that kind of stuff, they wanted to know what kind of guy am I; am I honest, can I be trusted, all that sort of stuff.

MR. WALTER SHAPIRO: Can I just interject here that there is

one state in the union which reminds us why the bosses created the unstoppable urge for open primaries, and that’s my home state of New York. And right now, New York, it is very, very hard to wage a party primary. You have elaborate election rules. John McCain, for example, will not quality his delegates in most states of New York [sic]. In 1996, only Bob Dole was allowed on the New York ballot, because the difficulties of getting signature filed exactly the right way on the right line are almost daunting.

As a result, the party leaders, the same kind of people who John Mutz wishes had more influence over the entire thing, have in the Democratic Party by going hat in hand, they have brought in Hilary Clinton. The Republican primary, the same party leaders working through Governor George Pataki, forced Congressman Rick Lazio out of the race and have anointed New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. By every single measure, there’s only one person in the world that Hilary Clinton might be able to beat for the United States Senate, and that’s Rudy Giuliani. And vice versa, the only person in New York state who Giuliani could beat is the First Lady.

I mean, these party leaders are the people who gave the Democratic Party in 1984 Walter Mondale, it is hard to work out a scenario for 1984 where another Democrat could have done worse. And the same Republicans who decided, in what seemed to be a winnable election year in 1995, the best way to deal with the youngest elected president, as I recall, since John Kennedy, certainly the youngest elected president ever to run for re-election was to nominate the oldest man who’d ever sought the presidency for the first time.

I mean, the reason why we do not go to the caucus system is because the caucus system eventually leads to the kind of closed rules that forced Hubert Humphrey on the Democratic Party in 1968 and forces me as a voter of New York to choose between Hilary and Rudy Giuliani.

DEAN KEN BODE: The party leaders that gave you Hoover, Harding and Humphrey; right?

Yeah, Brian.

MR. BRIAN HOWEY: I would like to interject something here. I’m scanning the crowd here, this topic here, this panel is called "Covering and Explaining the Political Process in the Age of Front-Loading," I don’t see many reporters here, and you’d think that an event like this would certainly capture their fancy when you’ve got two national chairmen here. I guess questions to the two from Northwestern University here, is there just a lack of interest on the part of journalism students to even engage in the political process?

DEAN KEN BODE: Well, I would tell you, Brian, that it’s a three and a half hour drive down here from Northwestern, and we’re right in the middle of finals up there, and if I had seen any Northwestern students from Medill down here in this audience, I would have been amazed at that, you know --

MR. BRIAN HOWEY: I was referring to the working press here.

DEAN KEN BODE: Oh, the working press. I’d be last folks that I need to ever feel responsible for explaining the behavior of the people who report for The Indianapolis Star.

(Laughter.)

We have questions. The gentleman from the district of Iowa.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, by the way, I thought Dole had sought the presidency before ’96, I think he ran in ’88 but didn’t make it. But, I mean, he sought it.

MR. WALTER SHAPIRO: No, I think the phrase I should have used

-- and again, forgive me for the lack of precision of speaking off the cuff, is I think he is the oldest person ever to be nominated who had never been nominated before.

DEAN KEN BODE: I just want to tell you, Walter, you be careful. This guy has books.

(Laughter.)

Moreover, we didn’t hear you, you say he ran for the presidency when and didn’t make it?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I thought in ’88 he was a candidate against Bush and didn’t do very well.

DEAN KEN BODE: Yeah, ’80 also, against Reagan. I have books.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: The question I have about the press is -- and I was a reporter myself for about 30 years, is: Nowadays, if candidate A is running against candidate B, and candidate B is an officeholder, we’ll say, he has voted for NAFTA, candidate A runs an ad and says, "Candidate B voted for NAFTA." TV especially and others say, "Ah! Negative ad!" Is that an attack ad when you say this man has voted for a bill? That, I think, helps to create this cyncism you’re talking about because it’s the wrong way to describe it, don’t you agree, if you say a person has this position?

DEAN KEN BODE: If you describe the ad the way you’ve described it, obviously it’s an issue ad and it’s an informative ad and it’s a piece of important information to a segment of voters on either side. Both sides learned where the candidate voted if it’s accurate advertising.

If, on the other hand, you do what Steve Forbes did in 1996, take a poll, take poll after poll after poll to decide what it was about the

front-runner Bob Dole that could be a liability -- he was too old, he’d been in Washington for too long, he had voted for things that evidently benefited himself or his own state too much in a wasteful fashion -- and then run ads that are contrived to make Dole appear to be somewhat dishonest, obviously way too old to be elected, and too much an insider in the -- and he may have been all those things -- in ways that most of us found to be ads that really detracted unnecessarily or even unfairly from the political career and reputation of a pretty good public servant. Those ads deserve to be put through a screen by journalists and said, "This is the purpose of the ad, these are the facts behind the ad" and so forth. I think it’s important to be able to do that. We call them ad watches, and I endorse them.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: (Inaudible.)

MR. WALTER SHAPIRO: Yeah, adding just to convey how awful the Forbes ads were, because they are a model of this, what they would do is take an entire omnibus appropriation bill that passed Congress unanimously, take the most extreme example buried in the fine print, I think it was an extra subway for the United States Senate and a ski slope, I think it was, in Colorado and run ads saying, "Bob Dole wanted to use your money to buy a ski slope." I mean, if you cannot call these attack ads, and as having survived the Schumer-D’Amato senate race, let me tell you that

-- I do stand-up comedy, and I have a colleague who does a whole bit on the Schumer-D’Amato ads. I’ll just give you one bit.

The comedian says, "Here’s how I’d appear in this ad. Scott Blakely (phonetic): Not funny then, not funny now." And this kind of voice of doom, negative ad is not comparative, it is not issue-oriented, it is usually arguing over trivial things like Schumer’s congressional attendance record versus D’Amato’s attendance record on the Hempstead board.

Anyway, don’t get me started.

DEAN KEN BODE: (Inaudible.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just wanted to join in a little bit on the quasi debate that we were having a little bit ago about the benefits of nominating in convention or caucus and open primary. And the point where were debating that in Indiana might have been ’74? Whatever year it was, maybe before that. But what we had done in ’68 to build the party was to take control of -- Bulen did -- control the process a little bit was to put the large county chairmen together. The fight then was among all those other chairmen who weren’t part of that coalition to get the open primary in the legislature. So Bulen sent us all over to the legislature to lobby and say, "If you really want us to control -- we big-city guys -- if you want us to control the process, give us an open primary. Because we’ll sit in a back room, we’ll raise the money, we’ll run the TV spots, and none of you folks will be involved." And basically that’s what happened.

So the political bosses that you were talking about, Walter, controlling that process aren’t the duly elected Republican type of representatives that John was talking about. I mean, we’re the kind that -- those of us now who sit and back room and raise the money, run the ads and win elections, that’s a different thing than those people who are elected in the primaries to be delegates and represent their constituents at the Republican or Democrat conventions.

MR. WALTER SHAPIRO: Oh, no, you’re totally right, and I should have specified that Indiana is a strong party state, and in most states the state parties have become as they are in New York state, nothing other than empty shells that are conduits for soft money.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, we’re right there. I mean, we’re that far (inaudible).

DEAN KEN BODE: Okay, yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Since the front-loading system not only eliminates candidates but also sanitizes ideas and dialogues that should be present in the political process, isn’t it the responsibility of the press as the watchdog and guardian of the people to reintroduce those very political ideas, policies and issues?

MR. JOHN MUTZ: Is that directed to any one of us or --

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Anyone.

MR. JOHN MUTZ: Okay. Well, it’s clear that the press has an enormous responsibility, in my opinion, to do just what you’re suggesting, and I don’t think there’s any question about that. One of the difficulties you have in a political campaign, however, though, is what is most likely to be read and what do editors and maybe even owners and publishers perceive is most saleable. Now, in the newspaper business today, it is a very tough go now because there are so many competing interests for the dollars that are involved there.

And so the kind of things that are being done are aimed at audience, how do I get a greater audience and so forth, that sort of thing. And one of the difficult questions you always have is how do you separate the public responsibility that goes with the First Amendment to the press with the business of making money in media? Now, there’s some people who say, "Well, that’s a conflict of interest." And then others say we’ve got to build the so-called Chinese wall between the two. And we’ve been pretty successful over the history of this country in doing that. Until recently. And I see some major concerns in that arena, and that’s a subject of another Bulen Symposium.

MR. BRIAN HOWEY: I guess one thing I’d like to throw at John here was --

DEAN KEN BODE: Let’s go around here and let others talk about that for a second, if we could, Brian, before you ask your question of John.

MR. BRIAN HOWEY: I was going to stay on the subject, but go ahead.

DEAN KEN BODE: Oh, okay, go ahead, I’m sorry, I thought you were going to change it.

MR. BRIAN HOWEY: This kind of goes back to the earlier point that there’s not many political reporters left in this state. I’m not sure if that’s the case across the country. There’s fewer political columnists that are weighing in on the issues, and then John Mutz ran a campaign for governor in 1988, and I know for a fact that there was a great deal of frustration. He probably pumped out more white paper and positions on the issues and probably got less coverage. Am I correct on that? And why is that?

DEAN KEN BODE: Let’s let Walter respond now to the question from the audience.

MR. WALTER SHAPIRO: Yeah, I just want to bring this back to the presidential primary system, and I think it’s a very good question, and I think what you have to realize is that the press is not omniscient about what issues are important. Sometimes, often, we stumble on issues that are important because candidates who articulate those positions happen to win key events, namely the New Hampshire primary.

Let me just give you two examples. In 1992, virtually no one was talking about balancing the federal budget until Paul Tsongas, a

funny-looking, former senator with cancer who was ridiculed as a joke candidate won the New Hampshire primary and became a survivor of the race against Clinton when insider challengers like Bob Kerry had fallen by the wayside. Suddenly, Clinton was competing with Tsongas to put out an economic plan. Into that environment then comes along Ross Perot talking about -- you know, I don’t have to remind you about Ross Perot. But the fact is that that process and the deliberation that New Hampshire primary happened, we could digest the results, talk about the results, change the nature of the Democratic Party, and it’s probably a contributing factor why we are talking about budget surplus -- instead of a federal budget deficit today.

Let me give you an example of an issue that’s probably equally important but got foreshortened by the front-loaded system. Pat Buchanan won the 1996

New Hampshire primary in significant measure because he was the only person talking to the non-unionized losers of the economic boom. The people who were sitting in these computer chip assembly plants working for six dollars an hour while the owners of the plants were doing…

(Gap in audio.)

…an important issue which is really what about the losers of globalization? Rather than sparking a vast national debate, as Tsongas by winning the New Hampshire primary did, Buchanan sparked the debate about a week and a half, and then the powers that be, the Haley Barbours of this world, who wanted to make sure the Republican nominee was either Dole or Gramm, who brought about the front-loading of the system, had such a front-loaded system that Buchanan was effectively out of the race 10 days after New Hampshire; thus, no large debate.

And I think one of the real casualties of front-loading is that issues do bubble up during the primaries, and if we don’t have a chance to digest what the voters are telling us, we don’t discuss those issues.

DEAN KEN BODE: I’d like to just comment about the idea that, first of all, there aren’t very many political reporters. I think there are probably at the present time more news outlets, both television and print, and Internet, than there ever have been before. If you go to the states of New Hampshire and Iowa, where the candidates are spending most of their time now, you’ll find more out of state reporters with them -- columnist reporters, TV commentators, what have you -- than ever there was before. There are just loads and loads of outlets and coverage at the present time.

I’m often told by folks that the press covers polls, it covers money, it covers scandal, it covers character, it covers biography, it doesn’t cover issues. I would say, watching this campaign, that if anybody who’s interested in politics doesn’t know where Bill Bradley stands on health or foreign policy; doesn’t know where George W. Bush stands on taxes or foreign policy; where Steve Forbes stands on his flat tax program; where Gore stands on the economy, the environment or Bill Bradley’s health-care program; where McCain stands on campaign reform or tobacco or Alan Greenspan, then you haven’t been paying attention. Because these things have been in the news, and they’ve been covered very, very well.

And it is possible to cover all the other things, which are important, biography is very, very important. I think it’s the most significant reason or way in which most Americans make their minds up to vote for president. We have to tell you who is this guy, and what’s his story? But we have also been telling you where they stand on the issues. And I think it’s a common lament amongst academicians and common lament in the public that the journalists don’t cover the issues. I really don’t think that can be laid at the feet of this crop of reporters in this election cycle.

(Gap in audio.)

MS. MARJORIE HERSHEY: …like to address all of you about this. There’s so much news, and this is kind of following up on what you said about the 24-hour news services. And it’s so different than it used to be, you had the three channels, you had the newspaper. But now, with this onslaught of information, is it a good thing, is it negative, has it made an impact? Because there’s just so much out there with MSNBC and C-SPAN, and CNN, and Fox News Network, I’d like to hear your comments about that.

DEAN KEN BODE: Brian, why don’t you start?

MR. BRIAN HOWEY: Ted Koppel gave a speech, I believe at Notre Dame, a couple of weeks ago, in which he said, "It used to be that in order to be a journalist, you had to either have a newspaper or radio or TV station behind you, and that gave you certification. Now, anybody can put up a Web site and declare themselves a journalist and reach people across the world."

I think what we need to be looking at here is credibility from the source. And there’s a lot of noise out there. We’re getting bombarded with a lot of information, anybody can get on the Internet and access all sorts of copy on any number of subjects. What needs to be distinguished these days are the credibility of the source that’s reporting it and making it available.

MR. JOHN MUTZ: I have to agree that the proliferation of news sources tends to create additional confusion, I think, in the minds of lots of people. When The Dredge Report gets credibility, I guess, you know, we realize that we have a real problem in that regard.

Now, one of the great things about our established media sources is that while they’re not perfect, they do have a recognizable record of credibility and responsibility. And finding ways to get people to think in terms of don’t take anything you hear or read or see as being the Gospel, but rather be selective as to what it is you feel or read and so forth, becomes one of the messages, I think, for communication studies, even for people in the grade and high school level in our education system.

DEAN KEN BODE: Walter, you want to comment on that while

we’re …

MR. WALTER SHAPIRO: Yeah, I’ll just very quickly add that one of the real problems with the 24-hour news cycle is we are filled with cable channels, forget the Drudges, of just people mouthing off, making predictions without any connection to reality. The easiest thing to do is to make predictions on the assumption that if you’re wrong, nobody will remember, and if you’re right, you’ll remind the world.

But the result is that it has an effect of doing whatever the convention wisdom is, whatever the bandwagon effect of the moment is, it tends to magnify it by another three or four times greater. And what this means is front-runners are even more front-runners, incumbent vice presidents are seen as unassailable for the nomination, and it -- I’ve gone on too long, and I’ve lost my metaphors.

Anyway, let me just end with the notion: I don’t like it.

DEAN KEN BODE: Well, then how do you think the New York Senate race is going to come out?

MR. WALTER SHAPIRO: I really, really wish that Norman Mailer would run again.

DEAN KEN BODE: He wouldn’t take the bait and make a prediction; did you notice?

John, go ahead.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you, Ken. Mr. Shapiro, my name is John McClain (phonetic). Isn’t the problem the electronic media, when they ask candidates to go onto the talk program such as Meet the Press and Bob Schieffer’s program, Face the Nation, they never, to me, ask them about serious issues, "How are you going to solve this problem, social security, how are you going solve this problem on this and that?" They want to get into the horse race business. What is the problem with the electronic media? You get a better job in the print media if you get The New York Times or any other publication. Like, the electronic media on the commercial networks are horrible.

DEAN KEN BODE: How do you like USA Today, John?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, I said the print media is good. It’s all right. I read his column.

MR. WALTER SHAPIRO: Well, I think the print media does have one advantage that if a Bill Bradley or a Steve Forbes gives you 35 minutes on their pet issue, and listening to Steve Forbes talk -- I taught economics with Steve Forbes, and it’s not a pretty sight. It’s not that he is ill-informed, I just happen to think that his starting premises are wrong-headed, and you can very easily find yourself in this sort of supply-side gulag, arguing policy forever. And the result is -- I have nothing wrong with policy, but I do have problems with spending endless air time having candidates mentally read aloud their position papers. Yes, they are important -- I still have not figured out with Bradley whether how much his health-care plan is going to pay in lieu Medicaid is averages, caps, or what they now call weighted averages. There are lots of issue-oriented questions to be resolved, and often they give way to horse race questions, but the idea of four hours unedited of Steve Forbes on the issues reminds me of an Andy Warhol documentary call Sleep. It was eight hours of a guy sleeping.

(Laughter.)

DEAN KEN BODE: That’s the last question and the last answer. We have a 10-minute break, and we’ll see you back here for the next panel, which is "Front-Loading: The Parties, the Public."

Thanks a lot, panel.

Also, I am supposed to mention to you folks that there is yet another book for sale outside, it is a book edited by Bill Mayer which has articles in it by two other of our panelists In Pursuit of the White House 2000: How We Choose our Presidential Nominees. And it is discounted, Bill; right?

(A break was taken.)

(Gap in audio.)

MR. ANDREW BUSCH: …so much as by this decentralized and accidental process of front-loading.

To make sense of this, we have to spend a minute thinking about what the objectives were of the reforms to begin with. And I think there were two: one that was very openly stated and one that was maybe a little bit less openly stated but was still central. The first one was to increase and improve participation. And it’s worth remembering that the McGovern Commission Report not only called for greater participation but for a meaningful and timely participation. Those were some of the words that were used to promote those reforms.

The second objective, I think, was pretty clearly -- to open the system more thoroughly to outsider candidates of one sort or another. They had in mind, I think, particularly the McCarthy campaign, but in principle this would apply to outsiders generally, that it’s the candidates who are either not supported by what you might amorphously the party establishment or who were, perhaps, even running against that establishment in some way.

Now, I think you can make an argument that both of those objectives have been defeated, that is, there’s more participation quantitatively in the earliest primaries. But after early March, not only does the quantity of participation go down, but it’s pretty clear that whatever participation is there is neither meaningful nor timely.

Second, I would argue at least that the system today, with the fully front-loaded situation we have, in combination with the one thousand dollar per candidate individual contribution limit, has created a system that is actually more closed to outsiders than probably any system in recent memory including, I would argue, even the system that existed before the reforms as late as 1968.

And to think about this, I would suggest that there are a couple of different types of outsider candidates who might appear. One would be the type of outsider who’s supported by a political movement, some sort of organized force that exists in society prior to the campaign. These folks are animated by some ideas and philosophy and usually are pretty well organized. At least the best movements are well organized.

And then you have on the other hand, sort of outsiders that I would call an unconnected outsider, that is, folks like Jimmy Carter, perhaps, or more recently, perhaps, Jerry Brown -- well, he ran, actually, the same time, in 1976 as well -- but folks who really aren’t connected to an organized pre-existing movement and who really depend a lot on personality, charisma, media.

What I would argue is that in the pre-reformed system, that is, through 1968, it was a system that only emphasized organization. There weren’t very many primaries, there were a lot of caucuses, most of the primaries were winner take all or some variation of winner take all. There were a lot of states that have pure delegate primaries, all of those things really were things that put a premium on organization which most of the time was represented by the parties and every once in a while by a movement and hardly ever by unconnected outsiders. So the system then was, I would say, more open than is commonly understood for movements but hardly open at all to these unconnected outsiders.

The reform system, I think, reversed that equation. It made the system more open to the unconnected outsiders, which helps to account for Carter’s victory in 1976, but possibly actually less open to the movements that were strong enough, theoretically, to win and really do well.

What I think the front-loading system has done is to produce a system that’s relatively closed to both types of outsiders. Not absolutely, I would certainly not argue that there will never be an outsider candidate of any sort who wins a nomination again. There have been scenarios laid out by other folks who would argue that that could happen. But I think the odds against it are pretty high right now and in the foreseeable future as long as there is this front-loaded system. So in this sense, I would argue that parties are not actually -- at least parties broadly understood, perhaps, are not actually buried in the blizzard of primaries but, in a sense, the party establishments broadly conceived are possibly in a better position to control nominations now than they have been for a long time. In some ways that’s good, in some ways it might be problematic, but I think that is where we stand right now.

DEAN KEN BODE: Okay, thank you. Let’s go now to Marjorie and let her respond.

MS. MARJORIE HERSHEY: We are supposed to be talking right now about the impact of front-loading on the parties and the public, I’m going to talk a little bit about the impact on the public via media coverage, because one of the great virtues of having possession of a microphone is that you can pretty well do what you please.

(Laughter.)

I think that this is the time when an academic conference is, as Ken Bode likes to say, "Everybody gets their chance to step up to the plate and bash the media." So let me just let you know that that’s precisely what I’m expecting to do. I want to tell Ken that, in fact, it’s not entirely the notion of bashing the media, I understand perfectly well why these things happen.

But what I want to start with is to tell you that we all know there are some common frames by which the media cover politics. There are some common story lines by which campaigns get covered over and over again. And in election campaigns, and as you also know, and as John Mutz pointed out to us just a few minutes ago, one of the most common frames is the horse race story line, the horse race story line that Bush has the big lead, McCain’s pulling even in New Hampshire, that Forbes is coming around on the outside, that Gore is faltering relative to Bradley, that his jockey has been advised to look more like an alpha male so that he can pull up a little bit further.

And I should say, by the way, with respect to John Mutz’s having mentioned this, that his daughter, Diana Mutz, is a very sophisticated commentator about media coverage, and I’d certainly recommend her work to you.

This is perfectly understandable frame for media coverage, because the media are private businesses, they have to sell papers, they have to sell air time, and one of the virtues of horse race coverage is that it generates the kind of excitement that can sell papers and can sell air time.

Portraying the primary season as a horse race which is one of the many things that the primary season is, is up to the minute, it involves conflict and drama, it doesn't require a lot of explanation, it doesn’t require a lot of discussion of abstract ideas, so it’s an optimal way to be able to engage people in a campaign.

And the development of a primary season is a perfect setting for a horse race story, because primaries form a sequence so reporters can show how the standings of the horses are changing from one time to the next, and it’s a fascinating thing to be able to see. Horses keep landing in different states and the coverage gains excitement as the primary season develops, and that gives rise to a standard form of reporting that generates momentum in media coverage, momentum both for the media and for the people who read it.

A candidate who wins, especially if he or she wins big or unexpectedly or as the result of some last-minute surge of public support, gets advantage in the next primary. That momentum seems to occur for a number of reasons. We’ve seen that anecdotally, we’ve seen Gary Hart win more votes than expected in New Hampshire and then all of a sudden jump up to an early lead in the next primary for no apparent reason other than that he had a substantial increase over what he was expected to get in New Hampshire. Why does this happen?

Some people want above all for their party to win. Okay? So it’s perfectly rational for them to look to the most recent primary and say, "Who is most likely to win? Which of the Republicans, which of the Democrats is most likely to come out ahead," so you can choose that person. There’s certainly a little of that that goes on in primary campaigns. From the perspective of the individual, it’s a perfectly rational thing to do.

Some people might respond to momentum simply because they like to be with winners. They like to identify with winners, it makes them feel important. This is not something I understand very well, I’m a Chicago Cubs fan, but I think, you know, there are people from whom these kinds of things are important, and so they use them. And there’s some evidence that that happens as well. We can see this in a lot of different ways. When we look at one of the most systematic, sophisticated national studies of voting behavior by the University of Michigan, we find when you ask people how they voted in previous presidential races, interestingly enough a lot of candidates have won by a landslide. They didn’t win by a landslide, the people remember having voted for the winner to a great extent than they remember having voted for the loser.

Now, is that fairly rational? Well, fairly rational for the individual, I suppose, if it makes people feel something that they would like to feel. From the perspective of the political system, no, it’s not, that doesn’t help us choose capable leaders.

We could also find that momentum occurs due to the fact that many of us don’t really have the great desire to immerse ourselves in a whole lot of information about presidential campaigns, we want to get to work, we want to make dinner, we want to make a reasonable choice in a primary based on the information that is reasonably available at the time. So when a candidate has just won the most recent primary, the media will cover that candidate, that candidate will be featured over and over again in news stories, on magazine covers, and people will get to know that candidate and may decide to choose that candidate as well. We have evidence of that too. We know that simple name recognition makes a difference in congressional races. We know that the candidate whose name is first on the ballot in many races will get an increment in the popular vote, if not a big increment but a small one.

Is that rational? For the voter, yes. It cuts his or her time, it lets people make choices without having to invest an awful lot of time. Is it rational for the political system? Obviously not. So, the kind of momentum that a candidate can build in primaries with the help of news coverage is perfectly rational from the perspective of the voter. It helps us get through this difficult choice more easily.

What does front-loading do to momentum? To what extent does it make it a greater influence on us or a lesser influence on us? It certainly cuts out a lot of the fun with respect to reporting momentum because we don’t have the chance to watch this 18-week marathon change over time. We’re down to a very short period of time.

Momentum over a long sequence isn’t necessarily going to help voters learn about candidates, what they would do to us if we elected them. On the other hand, when we have a very short primary race, maybe all we end up with is momentum. All we end up with the horse race phenomenon that’s inevitably dominating media coverage which is inevitably the only way that most of us learn about candidates.

What we learn is who’s likely to win and what’s brought them to that point, which was as so clearly stated previously, the money chase that has gone on for the past year. That’s not the way we want to select our presidential candidates. So what can we do about it? How can we mitigate the effects of this problem? The obvious answer is we can’t. There is very little chance of making any difference in this.

Let me provide you with a small alternative, one proposal that might be reasonable for media coverage and yet also beneficial for people who are watching that coverage. In the coverage starting now, leading up to those first few primaries and right immediately after that, wouldn’t it be fascinating if the media decided to play a national game show? Now, we all love game shows, people watch them, so a national game show would certainly be something that would sell newspapers and it would sell air time.

And the game show would have this question: What would be likely to happen if the front-runner wins? What would that person be likely to do to us after he or she is elected? Or what would be likely to happen if the person who is right behind the front-runner wins? Or what would be likely to happen if the person who is leading way back in the end of the -- whatever it is that you call bunches of horses that are running in a race are -- and reporters were to be able to take that question to political leaders all over the country, to party activists, to party leaders, elected officials, to various voters, and let us have a terrific national discussion on that point. To just ask: What is the likelihood that different kinds of things would occur if a particular candidate were elected? It fits into the horse race coverage of campaigns, it lets us have a chance to make predictions, and although Andrew rightly said just a few minutes that maybe we have a few too many predictions, this is one I’d like to certainly hear much more about. It could sell newspapers, it could sell air time, it might be an awful lot of fun to read. It could give reporters and political activists more of an opportunity to tell us a little bit about the substance that we would like to know about what these folks will do to us if we elect them. And maybe it might even distract our attention a little from the existence of the momentum itself.

DEAN KEN BODE: Thank you, Margie. I am really glad to hear you express the belief that the horse race sells papers because most of the editors and news directors that I know in this world think nothing about politics sells papers.

MS. MARJORIE HERSHEY: If there is anything about politics that sells papers, it’s horse racing.

DEAN KEN BODE: Curtis Gans.

MR. CURTIS GANS: I’ve got a suggestion for the Bulen Symposium, that we start back-loading in the interest of higher participation, having been on the next to the last or last panel in two successive Bulen Symposiums.

I want to first express my gratitude particularly to Bill Blomquist and Sheila Kennedy because I was greeted last night with a two-liter bottle of Pepsi in a Coke town, and that really helped out. I’m grateful also for being an old Bulen hand, by that meaning this being my second symposium, and I’m grateful in particular because I got a chance to meet Keith before he died and, you know, to feel his commitment to political parties and his involvement in it.

I’m always grateful to have a friend who is probably the only person who could have put this symposium together over time in the state of Indiana, and that’s my friend Mitch Daniels.

Ken Bode said I should say whatever I want to say, but I am going to return to the topic with, you know, one brief digression. I’m old enough to remember when Ken Bode wore a size 36 jacket.

You said I should say whatever…

But that also makes me old enough to have been involved in the last competitive primary in the state of Indiana in the Democratic Party which was in 1968 and which always led me to approach this city with some trepidation since we got our head handed to us, mitigated only by the fact that I also ran McCarthy’s campaign in New Hampshire and Wisconsin which results were slightly better.

I think one of the things we ought to step back when we’re considering the topic is to think about what indeed we are doing. We are in the nominating process selecting the person who is going to be president of the richest and most powerful and most influential and potentially the most dangerous nation in the world. We are selecting or trying to select the absolute best leader of both parties. We are debating fundamental issues and fundamental directions of both political parties, and we are, hopefully, trying to create either a new direction or a new consensus out of this process. That, I think, would argue for a process that permits deliberation, is of sufficient length that you can have early consideration and later consideration that invites various points of view and candidates to get into the process, that permits orderly change, but also creates some political stability, you know, sort of some combination of the 1968 and ’74 Democratic reforms that doesn’t make the press and money the principal actors, that does permit people without the wherewithal to get into the game to get into the game, but then they have to prove their mettle.

And for, I think, not one, and not two, but three reasons -- I think also we would like to have something called a convention that might have something meaningful about it, that we would like to, while maintaining a degree of respect for party leadership, maximize the level of participation within the parties because they are our principal mediating institutions in our society and should be responsible for the training of leadership and organizing of debate.

And for three reasons, not one, not two, we have created a system that not even a mother could love and that vitiates all of those principals. And the three are: front-loading, the one-thousand-dollar contribution limit, and the third which argues against regional primaries, the grouping of primaries.

The one-thousand-dollar contribution limit and the front-loading means on the one hand that you need a nut of 25- to $35 million to get into the game, and you either need to be a millionaire or have an enormous Rolodex of one-thousand-dollar contributors and an enormous amount of time in order to play the game which means that you are virtually precluding any outsider candidate that’s not a millionaire.

You are also lengthening the ersatz campaign at the expense of the real campaign because you need all this time to raise money and, you know, demonstrate your seriousness. You are going to be focusing on straw polls and the amount of dollars, whether you can get Naomi Wolf, and whether you can answer who is the leader of obscure countries.

What you are indeed doing is making the press, which should be informers, the arbiters in ways that shouldn’t be done. You are absolutely prohibiting the outside candidate or the late starter because the nomination will be decided in an artificial seven weeks in the Democratic Party and five weeks in the Republican Party. You do not permit the late-entering candidate, you do not permit the reconsideration, you do not permit a convention that has any meaning, and part of this is because people ran scared of the ‘68 and ’72 Democratic conventions, but there could be conventions that weren’t so divisive.

You are essentially undermining all of this, and by virtue of possibly creating the wrong nominees in the five weeks or six weeks of the process, you are also enhancing the possibility that neither of the major political parties will gain any credence in the American public and that we will indeed have a serious or frivolous third-party challenge that can undermine the party system.

With the grouping of primaries, what you are essentially doing is undermining the will to participate, because once you have more than three or four primaries a week or on a day, what you are virtually forcing people to do is a campaign that is built solely on political advertising and tarmac visits. You will have no grassroots organization, and indeed, my data, which Joe Andrew was good enough to use for other things, tends to show that in every time we have grouped from the 1988 Super Tuesday all the way through, you know, the multiple groupings in 1996, in the primaries that there were contests still -- for instance, you can’t count the Democrats in 1996 -- turnout was lower in the states that were grouped than in the states in which you could indeed engage in organizational and retail campaign.

Now, it is perfect garbage to say that nothing can be done. You can do something legislatively. I don’t prefer to do it legislatively because I would continue to want the parties to operate outside the legislative format.

But the way the Democratic Party actually maintained its window was essentially to threaten states that they would get a 25% reduction in the amount of delegates. I am sure that Mr. Mulholland back there might, if the situation said that he was going to get 242 rather than 484 delegates, might indeed bow to the party’s wishes. And therefore, there is a hammer that if the parties can agree, because you have to have a bipartisan agreement to set the schedule, and you have to have it timely enough for the Republican Party, which can only act on this at their convention, you know, to come to agreement, you can have a system in which you do not have either front-loading or the grouping of primaries.

You can set up a system in which -- I don’t care whether New Hampshire or Iowa is first. You know, I have some partiality to New Hampshire because I set out to dub Lyndon Johnson, and it helped me do that. But you mitigate New Hampshire and Iowa if you have fairly shortly thereafter individual primaries from different parts of the country that make the results a lot smaller and a lot shorter lived.

So I would suggest that we have a 25 or 50% reduction in delegates as the hammer, and that we sort of divide our primary season after New Hampshire and Iowa into three parts, that we permit no more than three primaries or caucuses in any given week, that we choose those by lot but that anybody who gets into the first group in one year has got to be in the last group the next year, and you move up the second group so that everybody has an opportunity to be part of the front. But we also have an opportunity that the last may be important again.

So I am suggesting, yeah, we have the power to make remedies, and yeah, we have a problem, and maybe the remedy shouldn’t be the easy and conventional ones that we are thinking about now.

Thank you.

DEAN KEN BODE: Brian, you have the last word.

MR. BRIAN VARGUS: I don’t know whether the last word is really worth it, but I come before you as somebody who is sort of, I guess, besmirched, because I -- as some of you know, locally I work for a television station, so in that sense I’m part of the media. We’ve heard enough bashing of pollsters, and I also do that. And then I look out there and I see at least two of my students sitting out there -- and by the way, this will be on the final, guys. And I’m an academic. You put those three things together, and I lose. So, I don’t know.

But the bottom line that I want to talk about is the last word in the title of this particular panel, "the public." We’ve heard a lot about the media, we’ve heard a lot about the party officials. We haven’t heard that much about the public.

One of the things that strikes me right off is a study I saw earlier this week done by somebody that I’m privileged to call a friend, Andrew Cohut (phonetic) from the Pew Center, the public has said they are already bored with the 2000 presidential race. Now, I don’t how they got there, but that’s what they say. Is that because the media and the pollsters, and to a certain extent the party leaders, have made politics a spectator sport?

Again, the law of good intentions and the outcomes. Remember the primary system dates from arguably the best Republican president of the 20^th Century, Teddy Roosevelt, and the notion that we need direct participation in selection of, in that case, United States senators and also in primaries.

Somewhere along the line, the public has disconnected completely from the political system. And I cannot emphasize how serious I believe that to be. I did a statewide survey of registered voters -- remember this is already a special group, registered voters -- in the state of Indiana. I asked them a simple question: Do politics and government have any relevance to your daily life? Two-thirds of the people answered no. The implications of that, ladies and gentlemen, I think, are very, very serious.

With that being said, are there any hopeful signs? Because, you look at the front line, you look at those nice charts that Joe had -- I thought those were really neat. Thought I’d grab those for class or something. There are a couple, and there’s one I want to talk about in particular. Next

week, at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., there is something called "The On-Line Democracy Project." This has to do with the influence of the Internet on elections, and they have studied extensively 15 mayors’ races this year, one of the them being Indianapolis, and I’m privileged to be giving the paper on Indianapolis. And there are impressive indications that the Internet does have some possibility of increasing input in a number of ways. We don’t know exactly where it goes yet. We do know, for example, as my friend Gordon Durnil was telling me at lunch, that he could tell from his e-mails during the mayor’s campaign here in Indianapolis exactly where public opinion was going and how they were reacting to a number of things that were going on in the campaign.

There’s also a part of me that wants to point out something else about Indiana in the case of this front-loading. Yeah, our primary’s in May. There’s an outside possibility that the primary might mean something for the Democrats, but I thoroughly doubt it. It’s going to be totally irrelevant at the presidential level. But I will remind you there are approximately 80,000 governments in the United States. And there are many levels on which people face one another in primary elections.

Traditionally, primaries were the elections that only the insiders played in. But is that always so? In Indiana, I already know that there is intense interest in the Republican Party in their primary for governor. There is also an open congressional seat in this state, the second district, in which there is intense interest particularly on the Republican side on who will be the nominee. There is some indications that people care about those primaries. I suggest to party leaders that here is an opportunity to do something, not to sit back and bemoan the fact that we’re no longer being able to play in the big game, but in point of fact reattach people at the local level. Because I’m one of those people who thinks Tip O’Neill was right, when you get down to it, people care more about the pothole out at the end of their driveway than they do most national policy. All politics is fundamentally local.

There’s something about the voters that we also have to keep in mind. There’s good research, Page and Shapiro’s The Rational Public being the best, I think, that shows opinions in general are relatively stable in the United States. But voting is not. As Miller and Shanks have shown in their recent book The New American Voter, the new generation of voters are using politics like background music, and now and then they turn it up and they jump into a race, and then they turn it down and they stay out for a couple. And until we figure out that puzzle, that’s something to always keep in mind.

You know, voting is not a stable act as it stands now. It’s something that people choose to do depending upon circumstance. Witness what happened -- a name I have yet to hear mentioned today, and it surprised the hell out of me --

DEAN KEN BODE: Jesse Ventura.

MR. BRIAN VARGUS: Jesse Ventura. Minnesota is a state that allows same-day registration. Minnesota is a state in which Jesse Ventura used one of the better advertising campaigns that I’ve ever seen done. And he won. Now, what he won is another story, whether he’ll ever do anything, I don’t know. But at the same time, we just got through having a mayor’s race here in Indianapolis, Indiana, and we had a turnout that approached the turnout for the congressional race a year ago. We had almost 200,000 voters show up for a mayor’s race. One month before that race, when I did a poll for the CBS outlet, one-third of the voters said they either weren’t going to vote or they didn’t care who won no matter what.

But we did a panel study of those people, and by election time, many of them reported they were going to vote, and apparently they did, because initial estimates of turnout have been between 100- to 130,000. And as I said, we almost doubled that.

There may be a generational explanation to that, and that’s something that Miller and Shanks talk about. But still, is it possible that a new set of primaries, perhaps the bifurcated primary system that Mike McDaniel talked about, which I realize our legislature would be loath to fund, changed a generation of the disinterested into the politically engaged. I think we’ll only know that when we see the turnout in a contested primary in a state, such as Indiana will be this year, in which the presidential primary is essentially decided.

In the last mayor’s race here, there was a contested primary on the Republican side and a decent turnout in it at that. All that suggests that the job is to give the voters some real choices. Front-loading, in my mind

-- and I agree with very much with Curt on this -- does not give voters the choices, it is removing them from them. And they’ve got to be moved in their own thinking beyond the notion that "My vote does not matter." Maybe, just maybe, a local level primary can have something to do with that.

Overall, I am probably much too optimistic, because I know the closer the government is to the people, the more they seem to trust it. But maybe that can be broadened into "The closer the primary that matters, the more attention I will pay to it." That, I think, fundamentally is the issue that really faces us, and that’s what’s really going to be important in terms of the ultimate impact of front-loading of primaries.

Thank you.

DEAN KEN BODE: Thank you, Brian.

(Gap in audio.)

…that the public is already bored and the public has disconnected completely from the political system, and that’s very dangerous, then went on to tell us there’s intense interest in the upcoming primary for governor and described how all these voters came out and voted for mayor in Indianapolis. You do make my head swim, Brian.

MR. BRIAN VARGUS: Thank you.

DEAN KEN BODE: Anyway, Curt Gans has one more thing he wants to add here. I’m going to give him a minute to do that. If you’d do it in a short period of time, Curt, can you? Two minutes?

MR. CURTIS GANS: I don’t know, I was going to filibuster.

DEAN KEN BODE: Go ahead. By the way, Curtis, I want to say, that little shot you took at the size of my sport coat, you know? Herbert Hoover used to say that every president ought to have the right to shoot one journalist every year without cause. After a day of moderating panels like this, every moderator ought to have the same right to shoot one panelist.

MR. CURTIS GANS: Well, I think we can be grateful for Ken being the moderator.

Ken asked a question this morning of the first panel about the debate last night, and that coupled with one other thing that I’m going to mention gave me the idea of what should be the next Bulen Symposium. He asked what was the most significant thing, and for me the most significant thing was it was being carried on a channel which nationally reaches 450,000 households. Let me couple it with a meeting in Washington shortly before the 1998 election in which an executive of the American Broadcasting Company was explaining why his network was reducing election night coverage to one hour. And he essentially said that "Well, if you want more, you can get it on CNN and C-SPAN and the Internet."

Now, I think we could have a very good symposium on what is the responsibility of the media to inform our public on how we should get them to achieve that responsibility. And maybe Mitch could work out how we can relate that to the political parties, you know, the theme of the Bulen Symposium. But I think that it is a terribly important question to address as the broadcast media, the ABCs, NBCs and CBSs, continue to diminish their coverage and cherish their prime time profits.

DEAN KEN BODE: Okay. We’re going to open this to the audience with the news that’s breaking out up here that this will be the last panel. So you have to get in now if you have something you want to say to these folks, any questions you want to ask, get down and ask the questions, and we’re going to adjourn in about 15 or 20 minutes.

Any questions from the audience?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name is John Zaphirou (phonetic). I have an observation. Curtis mentioned the fact that the process, that we’re electing the most powerful individual or whatever, and you’re correct. And then Brian talked about the engagement of the public. And the woman -- sorry, I forgot your first name -- mentioned about the -- the observation is -- the fact is that it was one time that an election was a defining moment in the sense that, you know, we define -- we had an election and it may be said that we have new policy-makers.

Speaking as the public, we hold elections, and they’re not over. It’s just one campaign after another. And even in the interim, there is one struggle over issues and policies that’s occurring in Washington or Indianapolis. The public in a sense is getting turned off, and my perspective is the fact that nothing is defined, it’s just one conflict, one battle, one mobilization. And all of America’s all involvement, with 240 mill- -- 260 million people, but there’s such activity, when someone’s talking about the noise, that people say, "Well, it does not make any difference. I can just cop out and just live my life and stay out of harm’s way, and maybe once in a while I may get involved, but I pick and choose."

But it is the fact that if we -- if we was going to elect a president to say this is what he stood or she stood for, and that was going to be the mandate for the four years, it doesn’t work that way because the next day, when they swear into office, there’s another issue that was never discussed. So we don’t have a way in the sense of getting anything off the table. Life is not that way.

And so what we probably needed to be thinking about is the fact that how do we remove the heat and the activity so that folks don’t think that we’ve got to -- you know, "The only thing I have to do is my political life." And a lot of folks are saying, "Well, it’s not important to me." They may vote, but they know that their vote is not really shaping public policy.

MR. CURTIS GANS: I think the perception you have is accurate in terms of what citizens perceive, and I think it’s probably a result of three things: one, the essential abdication of both major parties for consensual policy formation so that we don’t have programs that parties are committed to.

That’s coupled with two other things: one, the use or abuse of polling. It used to be, at least when I was growing up, that politicians stood for something, you know, wanted to do something, decided what was right, and then conceivably took polls to figure out how to sell it or whether it could be sold at all. Increasingly, the advocacy now is being driven by polls, and that essentially gives an ersatz quality to the politics and essentially sort of the development of a wedge issue mentality that doesn’t produce any results.

An offshoot of that is that essentially our politics have gone away from parties and been handed to irresponsible and nonresponsible political consultants, you know, whose only goal is winning elections. It has nothing to do with national public policy.

Mitch and I have occasionally conspired without success on trying to deal with one aspect of that, which is to say the big access for the consultant to have this dominant role and the pollster to have this dominate role is essentially the dominate role of televised political advertising in the shaping of campaign method. And my specialty, as Joe Andrew suggested, is looking at turnout and turnout decline. And I’ve long said that there are a lot of things that need to be done: education and civic education and values and -- but if I had only thing to do, we would cease being the only advanced democracy and one of the few democracies of any sort that does not regulate political advertising on television. And if we move to that, not only would we cut down the cost of campaigns, but we would get the consultants out of the center of our politics in the way they are now. That would be very useful.

DEAN KEN BODE: I’ve asked Bill Mayer to join us up here today at the end of this because Bill was to be on the last panel, and he’s here from a long way away to be part of that panel. So I’m going to take one more question from the audience, so if you’ll come down and ask it and then get some comments from the panel here, some closing comments.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: My name’s Charles Cassing (phonetic). Dr. Burris, I have a question for you. You said that one optimistic point is that even in an age of front-loading that local elections get more important and get people back involved. How is it possible when historically local elections have had, especially -- I mean, nobody votes for school board, to put it politely, you know -- has had the least amount of voter turnout, voter interest, how would you possibly shift from a general interest into the national to the local, when nobody pays attention to the local in the first place?

DR. RICK BURRIS: What I said was that I thought there might be some hope in this situation if, in fact, people’s attention would turn more to local policy. I also fully understand the fact that if you look at local turnout and so forth, it’s normally fairly low. But I’m operating in a special case, and Ken pointed out the sort of dilemma or conundrum or whatever it is that I face in trying to explain Indianapolis. Here we had a mayor’s race and a

city-county council race that even the insiders were talking about the turnout being much lower than it ended up being, almost to the level of two to one. And I don’t know exactly what activated that particular situation, but I’m saying, okay, it can happen there, then let’s start to study that and see what engaged people there, and perhaps this can have some positive impact.

I am fully aware of the low turnout on things like school board, even where they are partisan. And remember, many school boards elections are nonpartisan.

DEAN KEN BODE: Bill, some thoughts from you as you listen to the rest of discussion after your panel this morning.

MR. WILLIAM MAYER: Well, I guess the principal thing that I don’t think we got into but I think ought to be said just at the end, before wrapping up, is about -- I think the most difficult question about

front-loading is not deciding whether you like it or not. I mean, maybe I missed it, but I don’t believe anybody at this symposium has had a good word to say about front-loading.

I think the really difficult question is what you do about it. And the question there is not do you go to rotating regional primaries or time zone primaries or whatever, but who would create and enforce this new alternative. As I follow the discussion, there’s three alternatives: One is federal legislation which has been periodically proposed. I think Barbara Norrander made the point that there’s been some 40 bills submitted over the last couple of congresses.

There’s several problems with that, not the least of which is that at least my reading of the Constitution gives the federal government no authority whatsoever to legislate in this area. I’m sure there’s -- there’s got to be some way to finesse it, because I’m sure somebody else has thought about this, but it you at least read the plain text of the Constitution, there is nothing in Article II that gives the federal government any authority to talk about the nomination of candidates and, frankly, not even a great deal of authority about the selection of members of the electoral college.

A second alternative which is sort of what the National Association

of Secretaries of State is now pushing, is what you might call a voluntary interstate compact, where states sort of get together and all sort of decide on their own that they will hold regional primaries on particular dates

or that they will rotate. The problem with this kind of a system is that

it requires virtually full cooperation from everybody involved. And if we were going to get that cooperation, we wouldn’t have the problem that we’ve got.

You can talk all you want about -- I mean, the most emphatic problem with that kind of a system, which I think was what Bob Mulholland said when he was asked about will California join a rotating regional primary, and he said no. And I assume that the governor and state party chairs in New York and Texas and Florida and Illinois will say the same thing. That leaves the parties -- and even there I think there’s a question about how do parties enforce this kind of a thing.

Maybe, I mean, if they penalized delegates 25- to 50%, on the one hand I suspect there are states like Iowa and New Hampshire that would turn around and say, "Hey, if the trade-off is between getting all the attention we get and having a few less delegates, we’ll have a few less delegates."

I also think there’s some question about whether either or both national parties have the willingness to enforce that kind of a stick. The one precedent I can remember is in 1984, both Iowa and New Hampshire technically held their primary and caucus in violation of the Democratic rules, and they went ahead and held them anyway. And when it got around to the convention, the Democrats said, "Well, okay, let’s not press a point" and seated the full delegations.

So I think the real sticking point here is one of finding solutions to the problem, and unfortunately, you know, I think there’s a lot of good activity being done in that direction, as we found at lunchtime, but it is a more intractable problem than I think a lot of the comments here have suggested.

DEAN KEN BODE: Thank you, Bill.

I would like to make a couple of comments as the moderator here. I’m going to tell you a true story about the old ways of doing it and the

new ways of doing it, and I guarantee you this story will be sure to get me disinvited from ever being the moderator of the Bulen Symposium again.

But, several years ago, there was a movie that came out called Blaze.

And that movie was about the romance between Blaze Starr, the most notorious strip-tease artist in America in her time, and the Governor of Louisiana, Earl Long.

Now, as it happens, in those days in Louisiana, they had an antiquated system of selecting delegates. That is to say, the governor just picked all the delegates that were going to the national convention. There were no caucuses, there were no primaries, there was no state committee meeting to decide who the delegates were, the governor decided who was going to the convention.

Now, just around that time there was an attractive young Democratic, ambitious senator, named John F. Kennedy, who wanted to be president. So in 1959, as he was traveling around the country, he decided that he ought to try to figure out if there was anywhere in the South that he might have any support because he was a Catholic. And there was no place in the South that really had any interest at that point in the Democrats nominating the first Catholic president.

And he looked down in Louisiana and discovered, lo and behold, there is a Catholic population in Louisiana; Cajun Catholic population. And you had this kind of quirky Louisiana governor named Earl Long, who was kind of pro civil rights at the time and might be interested in supporting a northern candidate.

And so John F. Kennedy packed up his wife, Jackie, and they went down to try to avail themselves of the advantages of this single-handed, we pick ‘em all, no primaries, delegate selection system in Louisiana. And when he got down there and met the governor, the governor immediately said to him, "Look, we’re going to have a meeting, but we’re first going to go see my girlfriend." So they went to a little place called The Show Bar, where Jackie Kennedy and Jack Kennedy watched Blaze Starr’s strip-tease act.

Jackie watched one session and went back to the hotel and went to bed. Jack stayed with Earl until it was over with, and then they all went to the Roosevelt Hotel where all of the Long cronies gathered, and they were going to have a party and a discussion.

Well, when they got there, Jack Kennedy had an eye for Blaze, and

at one point some of Jack’s entourage, his hangers-on, his supporters,

his traveling entourage said to Blaze, "Why don’t you and Jack go hide in the closet, and we’ll tease Earl ‘cause he’s notoriously, outrageously jealous."

Blaze Starr tells me this story. I have it on NBC videotape. She said, "We hid in the closet. But, of course, Jack’s aides never said anything to Earl."

And I asked the follow-up question that any reporter would ask at this point, I said, "And?"

Blaze said, "He was quick."

Now that’s the way they did it in the old days; it can’t be done with front-loading. And that’s the end of this conference. Thank you all for being here. Thank Mitch and Sheila and Bill for doing this. Thanks to all of our panels.

And that has nothing to do with anything except I just wanted to tell you that story.

(Applause.)

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