March madness: how the primary schedule favors the rich.

• Author: Shapiro, Walter
• Position: Presidential races in 2000 - Cover Story

A small boast: I have perfected question guaranteed to prompt gape-jawed puzzlement from would-be presidential candidates of both parties. I have not been inquiring about knotty policy conundrums like the economic implications of the Euro or Medicare financing formulas for teaching hospitals. Nor have I invaded marital privacy with one of those snarky have-you-ever queries so favored by the character cops on the political beat. Rather, my question is directly relevant for any long-shot dreamer who fantasizes about taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2001.

Here's what I ask: Do you worry that the primary calendar is so rigged that only the best-financed candidates have a shot at winning a presidential nomination? John McCain, the press pack's favorite Republican, confessed that he hadn't thought about the question. Nor had liberal maverick Paul Wellstone on the Democratic side. John Ashcroft, who seems to be the self-appointed candidate of the unborn, ruefully admitted, "It takes wiser heads than mine to figure it out. We've got to play by the rules that they've set up."

Ashcroft talks as if these rules were set down by the Marquess of Queensberry to add a note of gentlemanly fair play to the rough-and-tumble of political combat. In truth, the primary schedule resembles nothing so much as the Mad Tea Party from "Alice in Wonderland" Both parties are likely to select their nominees in 2000 under a hyper-compressed, warp-speed timetable that only money-talks front-runners like Al Gore and 15-year-old computer geeks with joy sticks could possibly love. I know it seems bizarre to brood about the dates for the primaries more than 18 months before the Iowa caucuses, especially with our campaign-finance laws in tatters and the political mood as ugly as the Jerry Springer Show. But I am convinced that the primary calendar, more than any other single factor, unfairly dictates outcomes.

As recently as 1992, the primaries meandered from New Hampshire in mid-February until California in early June. Bill Clinton, for example, uttered his famous I-didn't-inhale puffery in an April TV interview on the eve of the New York primary and didn't silence the doubters in the Democratic Party until he nailed down California. OK, the dour Paul Tsongas, Clinton's last mainstream rival for the nomination, did not survive the daunting gauntlet of mid-March primaries known as Super Tuesday. But this long march to the nomination gave the voters and the press more than...