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No primary should be held before April 1, and they should all be held within 90 days. The present multiplicity of primary voting days could be limited to three or four, and the primaries could be scheduled on a regional basis, greatly reducing the need for the candidates to hopscotch around the country. This idea was endorsed last December by the President's Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties. Some experts have advocated grouping the primaries on a more scattered basis in order to avoid favoring any one region, but regional primaries seem a more coherent way of testing the voters' preferences.
-The proportion of elected and committed convention delegates should be decreased. The current system commits most delegates elected in the primaries to vote for their candidates on the first ballot, regardless of what happens in the world during the months before the convention. It thus tends to reduce the convention to a mere ratification. One interesting proposal put forth by Newton Minow, Adlai Stevenson's law partner and a longtime Democratic stalwart, would not limit the primary balloting to party members but allow independents to participate in a separate "advisory" primary; their votes would help test popular sentiment but would not be binding on any delegates. A more sweeping and effective reform would be to have only half the delegates elected in the primaries. The other half would be chosen by the top state official of the party, either the Governor or the party chairman, and would consist mainly of public officials. Such a change would immediately restore to the party organizations a good deal of their lost power. It would reduce the importance of celebrity politics. It would establish valuable relations between the presidential candidates and local officials. -The rules on campaign financing should be loosened. Since the 1976 election, candidates have operated under complex rules that require them to scrounge for thousands of small donations in order to get matching federal funds, which last year reached a maximum of $7.4 million. Designed to eliminate sinister "fat cat" donors, the current rules limit individual contributions to $1,000, and only the first $250 of that counts toward the matching funds. The reforms have made an immense growth industry out of finding and exploiting loopholes. Money has poured into the political action committees newly organized by various industries and interests, and they donated roughly $55 million to their political favorites in 1980. Among the most notable exploiters of the new system: single-issue groups like the antiabortion lobby, particularly those that have easy access to computerized direct-mail fund-raising lists.
The simplest solution would be to abolish all limits on donations, requiring only that they be made public. If a candidate wants to take $10,000 from a big defense contractor, let the voters judge the motive of the gift and the propriety of accepting it. Another change, which would contribute mightily to the general goal of rebuilding the political parties, would be to give them a supplemental federal election fund that they could spend as they see fit on behalf of the national ticket. Nothing could do more to make the enfeebled party chairmen become figures of authority.
How THE WORD SPREADS