Coming attraction: The 2004 train wreck

If you enjoyed watching election lawyers squirm in 2000, I guarantee you the Presidential contest of 2004 will not fail to disappoint. All is in place for a full-scale train wreck, and I hope you like carnage, because it's too late to stop the trains.

This all stems from a mismatch between the party's schedules for nominating their candidates and the public funding system on which most Presidential hopefuls have come to rely. Bush will be more than fine, but the Democrats will have some tough choices to make. And none of the outcomes seem terribly appealing, especially when considering the precedent for 2008.

First, take a look at the nomination process. While some state parties (like New Jersey's) are content to schedule their primaries so late as to be irrelevant, many others have been clamoring for the early spots in an attempt to draw in media attention and campaign dollars. The result is a nominating contest that is heavily frontloaded. Next year may be the most extreme yet: the first caucuses will be held in January, and the Democratic nominee will have the race clinched by early to mid-March.

Now consider the way those campaigns will be funded. Presidential candidates may qualify for partial public funding during the nomination process, conditional on their acceptance of a spending cap that will be in place until the nominating conventions at the end of the summer. It's a well-intentioned system that was designed to give lesser known candidates more of a chance, limit the rising costs of national campaigning, and limit the role of private campaign contributions. But with the selection process as frontloaded as it is, the system just won't work.

The amount a candidate spends by the end of March is strongly correlated with the percentage of total delegates chosen by March 15 (a good indicator of how frontloaded the contest is). It's pretty much common sense: the earlier the contest is to be decided, the more the candidates have to spend early on. But remember, if they take public funding, they cannot spend over a set limit, and given that we already have a nine-way contest for the 2004 Democratic nod, the winner is going to end up pretty close to the limit by the end of March. That means that for most of the spring and summer, the Democratic nominee will have virtually no money to spend.

That would be fine if the same were true for the Republican, since then they would both just keep quiet and regroup for the general election. But that's not going to happen. In 2000, the Bush campaign juggernaut rightly calculated that it had enough support to raise more money in individual private contributions than it would have received in public funds. So Bush eschewed public funding, became exempt from the spending limit and spent twice what the other candidates were allowed. John McCain didn't stand a chance.

Now that Bush has both the advantages of incumbency and higher contribution limits (thanks, ironically, to McCain-Feingold), his reelection campaign will be a fundraising powerhouse. So while the Democratic candidate is going to be strapped for cash in the late spring, Bush is going to have money coming out of his ears. It'll be brutal. Small children probably shouldn't watch.

To make matters worse, the money available for the public funds program is dangerously low, and if too many candidates qualify (a serious possibility with nine in the mix), they may very well break the bank. And that would mean even fewer funds available to them.

The only way out of this mess is if some of the Democrats decide, like Bush, not to accept public money. That way, they wouldn't be restricted by spending limits that will kick in way too early. And many of the candidates are giving this option serious thought.

But unlike Bush, any one of the Democrats in this crowded field is going to have a tough time raising sufficient funds without accepting money from the government. Democrats always have fewer big donors available to them than do Republicans, and when those donors' sympathies are divided between nine different contenders, there won't be so much to go around.

Even worse, suppose one or two Democrats decide to forego public funding and do so with a decent amount of success. The rest of the candidates will be all but shut out from the process, and it will be the end of Presidential public funding as we know it. No future candidate would in his right mind take public funds, and all the benefits of public funding would be worse.

The only solution is to redesign the nearly 30-year-old public funding laws to better account for the realities of the race. Hopefully that will happen by 2008. But for 2004, the trains have already started. Looks like the F.E.C. will be needing some help from F.E.M.A.