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By Bob Benenson, CQ Politics Editor
The contenders in the extraordinarily early (Jan. 3) Iowa presidential precinct caucuses were faced with an unprecedented quandary, one that got a lot of media attention earlier this week: With this potentially crucial first-in-the-nation voting event coming up just little more than a week later, should they or shouldn't they schedule any campaign activity or ads on Christmas Day?
Concerned about further antagonizing Iowa voters whose holiday shopping excursions already had been hindered by candidates' campaign caravans, all of the White House contenders took Tuesday off. News reports noted that all of them left the state to celebrate with their families -- except Christopher J. Dodd , the Connecticut senator and longshot Democratic presidential hopeful, whose stockings were hung with care in the Des Moines apartment he and his family rented so he could do Iowa 24/7 . . . except, of course, on Christmas Day.
What was missing from most of the coverage was a discussion about how the Christmas quandary reflected the ludicrous scheduling of these crucial caucuses and primaries.
Ever since the Iowa caucuses emerged in the early 1970s as the presidential campaign kickoff event, candidates have been challenged to come up with get-out-the-vote strategies for these typically low-turnout exercises in participatory democracy.
But the scheduling of the 2008 Iowa caucuses for just after New Year's Day has pushed the situation facing candidates beyond the border of ridiculous. They have had to try to grab the attentions of voters distracted by their holiday preparations and the holidays themselves, while not annoying them past the point of diminishing returns.
Added to the usual last-minute turnout worries will be whether potential voters are still recovering from their New Year's festivities, whether students whose schools are still out on holiday break will return to participate, and, oh, yeah, the televised Orange Bowl college football game directly conflicts with the caucuses that Thursday night.
The impact of all these vagaries on the outcome of the caucuses, in which the decisions of a few thousand people to attend or not go can make a huge difference, creates an even greater air of unpredictability that is virtually impossible for pollsters to measure.
Then, after a frantic turnaround to New Hampshire -- where the traditional first-in-the-nation primary, the other major "retail" campaigning event in the nominating process, will be held on the earliest-ever date of Jan. 8 -- the campaigns suddenly go national. Candidates will have to balance their desires to do well in the handful of other states that pushed their contests into January (some facing penalties for breaking the national parties' scheduling rules), with the need to pinball around courting votes in the nearly two-dozen states that have jammed their contests onto Feb. 5, the first date allowed for most of them under those national party rules.
It was this rapid acceleration of the primary "front-loading" frenzy that prompted Iowa and New Hampshire officials to challenge the Yuletide patience of their states' voters. In fact, Iowa officials for a time considered moving their caucuses up into the 2007 calendar year before settling on the Jan. 3 date.
And if some grown-ups in the Democratic and Republican parties don't drop their long-standing reluctance to confront this issue -- even at risk of irking political activists in one or another state -- then get ready for some voting events to sneak into late 2011 when the 2012 presidential campaign rolls around.
It is very true that few people besides seriously addicted political junkies give a moment's thought to the flawed presidential nominating calendar. Too inside baseball. Nonetheless, we are in one of those times in which the public's confidence in the political process as a whole is already at low ebb. And the frozen inability of the two major national parties to persuade their state affiliates to subscribe to a nominating process that is more rational, deliberate and understandable to average voters is not raising that confidence level one bit.
There are a number of proposals for reforming and just maybe improving the process.
One of these ideas came close to being adopted in 2000 by the Republican Party -- which likely would have prompted the Democrats to fall into line, since states are reluctant to pay for the parties to hold their primaries on
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