Oh, What A Screwy System

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After Iowa and New Hampshire, the field narrows drastically, long before voters in larger states can cast a ballot. Most candidates must adopt an identical strategy: labor mightily for an early kill while preparing for an endurance run later. Schedule and rules, far more than issues and message, dominate.

And the process keeps changing. The Democratic leadership, aware for years that the post-1968 reforms were flawed, has continued to tinker. But despite a consensus that the calendar had to be made more rational, no one could control ) the "nomination window" in either party. States resentful of Iowa's and New Hampshire's clout have moved up their contests to create "front-loading," a jumble of primaries and caucuses in the first month of action. Front-loading enhances the importance of doing well in the first two major competitions. Voters in the second and third rounds, having seen little of the candidates, have only a few weeks to review the field, weeks in which news is dominated by wins and losses rather than by who stands for what.

Michigan Republicans decided to stage the earliest selection process of any this year, beating out even Iowa. They returned to a kooky, multitiered convention system starting 27 months before the general election. As the regulars slept, conservative supporters of Pat Robertson and Jack Kemp took over the party apparatus. When George Bush's partisans woke up, a series of bruising lawsuits followed. After last week's debacle, the result may be a contested delegation. Says Field Reichardt, a moderate who helped draft the Michigan plan: "We should never have done this. In the short run, it's causing our party to self-destruct."

The biggest front-loading rebellion for 1988 occurred in the South, where Tory Democrats have suffered terminal frustration over the liberal influence of Iowa and New Hampshire. They conspired to construct Super Tuesday, March 8, when 14 Southern and Border states will choose a fourth of the Democratic (and nearly a third of the Republican) delegates. The intent was to diminish the impact of Iowa and New Hampshire, forcing candidates to court moderate voters elsewhere. Yet most candidates in both parties have wooed Iowa and New Hampshire more intently than ever, fearing that bad showings would cripple them before they could get to the South. And because blacks are so large a part of the Dixie Democratic vote, Jesse Jackson, the most liberal of the candidates, is likely to laugh last when the Democratic votes are counted on Super Tuesday, hardly the result the region's establishment had in mind.

Even before the first 1988 primary vote, there is talk about the need for further change. Surprisingly, some Iowans also sense a new turn of the wheel. Says George Wittgraf, director of the Bush Iowa campaign: "This is too much weight to be on the shoulders of one state. I don't think Iowa will ever again be as important as it is in 1988." There are signs of candidates' trying new strategies: Albert Gore is holding back until the Super Tuesday races in the South; Cuomo is sitting on the sidelines and refusing to rule out a late entry should the whole nominating contraption freeze up.