On Red & Blue and Primaries and Superdelegates.....

[BooScout]

I just came across this and thought that while it's a bit dated, it explains pretty well how the Democratic Party and our primaries have arrived at where they are today. Read what you want into it.....I just thought it was pretty informative.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/11/23/primary_colors/

Primary colors
How a little-known task force helped create Red State/Blue State America
By Mark Stricherz, 11/23/2003

ONCE, OUR TWO MAJOR political parties were thought to represent the haves (Republicans) and the have-nots (Democrats). But now they increasingly represent either "Red" or "Blue" America. According to a new study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the country is evenly but sharply divided by region and culture. This confirms that the color-coded electoral map of the 2000 presidential election -- in which Democrats won the "blue" states on the coasts and upper Midwest while Republicans won the "red" heartland and the South -- was no fluke. Indeed, note the study's authors, in their 16 years of measuring voters' attitudes, there has never been a wider gap between church-attending, socially conservative Republicans and relatively sermon-free and liberal-minded Democrats.

There have been a number of attempts to explain this growing divide. In their 1991 book "Chain Reaction," Thomas and Mary Edsall argued that the Democratic Party's embrace of the civil rights movement, followed by Nixon's Southern Strategy, caused many working-class whites to desert their ancestral party in favor of the GOP. In 1991, E.J. Dionne Jr. extended the argument in his book "Why Americans Hate Politics," contending that Republicans "were able to destroy the dominant New Deal coalition by using cultural and social issues -- race, the family, 'permissiveness,' crime -- to split New Deal constituencies."

But both explanations are overly broad and incomplete. If region and culture divide the parties, it is not simply the legacy of the upheavals of the 1960s. It is also the legacy of a forgotten 28-member body called the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection (1969 -- 72), better known as the McGovern or McGovern-Fraser commission.

The McGovern commission, chaired first by Senator George McGovern and then Congressman Don Fraser of Minnesota, ended the old boss system of choosing presidential nominees and helped create the modern presidential primary system. This led to a class shift in each party, as affluent liberals gained more power in the Democratic Party while working-class conservatives won more say in the GOP.

(more) http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/11/23/primary_colors/