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How soon are the Iowa caucuses? Not soon enough for some candidates, way too soon for others and for some candidates it really doesn’t matter because their campaigns are already in the tank.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, seated, prepares to sign SB113 which will move California’s presidential primary election from June to February (AP Photo/Steve Yeater) (Steve Yeater - AP)

Add to this the news today that California is moving up on the primary calendar to make February 5th 2008’s “Super Duper Tuesday” a “New and Improved Superer Duperer Tuesday and any candidate with less than $50 million in the bank by the end of this summer can forget about measuring for curtains in the Oval Office.

Questions are flying about whether this will cause some of the early primaries and caucuses to move their dates forward to renew their prominence at the front of the line. The question that I have though relates to some recollection from last year’s DNC summer meeting where they passed a rule(?) that indicated their primary schedule was set and that any candidates who ran in a changed date primary would not receive that state’s delegates at the convention. Did I miss something? Can one of you D’s out there set me straight?

The upside of this move is that it takes us one more step closer to a national primary. The folks in Iowa and New Hampshire don’t really represent the demographic base of this country, and now they won’t be determining who it is we vote for in the fall. It also means that candidates will need to spend their time addressing national issues instead of farm subsidies, ethanol or jobs in the granite state.

One unusual side effect of this is (though I don’t think the big two have quite figured this out yet) that a potentially strong third party could emerge.

With the advent of the internet, the effort needed to develop a strong national grassroots effort will be easier than what it takes now to build a national campaign in the old state-by-state manner. I can send an email to 50 or 5000, it’s just a matter of a few keystrokes. To make 50 phone calls, or knock on 50 doors requires time-intensive action and lots of people. State-based GOTV (Get Out The Vote) programs are built on the old-time party structures that rely on geography as an organizing tool. Often they involve folks who aren’t well-versed in the new technologies (sure they’ll make phone calls, stuff envelopes, heck they might even go door-to-door), so don’t expect them to maintain a MeetUp group or post regularly on a blog. This is not to say that the new organization is better than the old. Just ask the Dean people what happened when they tried to translate internet-magic to the ground in Iowa. It didn’t work, but with a national primary they won’t need it to work.

The bad thing about this mega-primary is that the old style retail politicking that have brought some dark horses from the back of the pack to the front will end sooner. It also means that candidates who spent the last 3 three years sleeping in hotels and at volunteer’s homes in Iowa and New Hampshire (can you say John Edwards?) just wasted three years building grassroots organizations when they should have been focusing on raising money. This kind of move toward a national primary will put more power in the hands of high-priced consultants and their slick ads. And because of the saturation of advertising it’s likely that negative campaigning will be even more prevalent.

I just wonder if the folks in Columbus will be able to contain themselves and hold with our current primary date…