Editorial
Lansing State Journal
U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Detroit, is finally getting traction on his long push to reform the Democratic Party’s presidential selection process.

Michigan and the nation - stuck as they are right now with two dominant political parties - only can benefit from Democratic reform.

Last month, a Democratic panel endorsed a revamped schedule for primaries and caucuses. It would add a caucus right after the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses and add a primary after the New Hampshire primary. (The new schedule still needs a vote from the full Democratic National Committee.

Levin and others argue Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s protected positions distort presidential nominations, since the two states hardly look like the rest of America. And Democrats also should consider the fact they have lost six of the last nine presidential elections - that doesn’t speak well of the process they use to find candidates.

But that isn’t just a matter of partisanship. Without a tectonic shift in the two-party system, America has a vested interest in the performance of the Democratic and Republican parties. Those parties should be selecting national candidates by testing hopefuls against a cross-section of the nation, not against a tiny sample of activists in out-of-the-way states.

This Democratic revamp falls far short of true reform - the creation of regional primaries that rotate through the calendar.

Dogged pursuit by Levin and allies, however, has the Democrats thinking. And that’s a start.

http://www.lsj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060705/OPINION01/607050365/1086/opinion

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 3:41 pm and is filed under News About Carl, Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.