Reform Reconsidered

Party reform has brought more problems than the McGovern commission ever dreamed of when it laid down guidelines for the selection of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Of the 478 delegates chosen to date, at least 220 are on slates that have been challenged by one aggrieved faction or another. The Democratic National Committee, which has the task of coping with the challenges, admits that it is bewildered. "I have this recurring dream," says Committee Official Robert Nelson. "It involves a small news story out of Miami describing the first lynching in the South in 40 years. I was the one they lynched."

The McGovern commission promulgated rules that are sometimes as vague as they are hard to implement. The stickiest guideline calls for women, youth and minorities to be represented on delegations in rough proportion to their percentage in the population. While the intent was not to set up a quota system, that is what it amounts to. The National Women's Political Caucus, for instance, is challenging delegations that do not reflect the number of women in a state, which is almost always more than one-half the population.

Target No. 1 of the reformers' righteous wrath is--guess who?--Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley, bloody but unbowed from recent election setbacks. How can anyone call for more democratic selection procedures and yet impose quotas? he wants to know, not entirely illogically. But a group of anti-Daley Chicagoans have filed a 43-page brief charging the 59-man bloc controlled by him with violating just about every rule in the McGovern book.

Until the convention begins, the Democratic National Committee will do its best to try to persuade the factions to accept a compromise; some offending delegates might be exchanged for others who are more acceptable to the opposition. But it is all groping in the dark, since the McGovern commission rules provide no guide for remedies. The final decision rests with the Credentials Committee and the convention; if most of the disputes have not been negotiated beforehand, the prospects for chaos are chilling.

Rules. This would do nothing to help the Democrats' chances of regaining the presidency, which, after all, is the purpose of the convention. In the ferocity of their intraparty feuding, some Democrats seem to have forgotten this. It would doubtless be soul-satisfying for some reformers to give Daley his comeuppance and expel him and his claque from Miami. But what happens then? muses a National Committee official. "Are we going to say: 'Well, Dick, we know it's going to cost us Illinois, but a rule's a rule'?" The reform-minded 1972 convention could turn out to be as disastrously divisive as the boss-led 1968 convention.

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