A Bartered Nomination?

By WALTER SHAPIRO

It was a beguiling fantasy. After two decades of disorder, the Democrats finally thought they had invented a system that would create an all-but- certain nominee after the 20 state primaries on March 8, which will choose more than 30% of the convention delegates. Super Tuesday seemed perfect for a bandwagon bonanza: the winner would roar out of the South with enough momentum to coast to the nomination. Finally, the party would anoint its standard- bearer early enough and end the intraparty bloodletting soon enough so that he might carry something other than his home state and the District of Columbia come November. No more byzantine delegate arithmetic, no more bitter fights to the California primary, just a front-loaded primary calendar designed to produce a nominee who would be, at last, up for the '80s.

What fools these mortals be when they try to tinker with the Democratic Party's natural affinity for chaos. Instead of providing clarity, the split verdicts from Iowa and New Hampshire have left four strong Democrats in the race, each of whom can aspire to roughly one-quarter of the March 8 delegate harvest. Michael Dukakis, who scored a firm but not flashy 36% New Hampshire victory, heads into the unfamiliar terrain of Dixie as the leading white liberal in the race. Jesse Jackson, of course, should corral almost all the black vote. By finishing second in New Hampshire, with 20%, Richard Gephardt demonstrated that his nativist trade policies and his fiery mock-populist rhetoric resonate with blue-collar voters across the geographic spectrum. And Albert Gore, the not-ready-for-North ern-climes candidate, must prove that his Southern endorsements and smart-set moderate appeal can translate into primary votes.

After New Hampshire, the Democratic contest remains a tangled wrangle. The current consensus of party professionals is that no candidate is likely to win a delegate majority before the primary and caucus season ends in June. But that does not necessarily mean a modern-day version of a brokered convention, where a cabal of Democratic leaders finally gather under NO SMOKING signs to award the nomination to Mario Cuomo.

Far more probable is a bartered nomination. That shorthand phrase describes an open and public preconvention bargaining process in which the surviving candidates feverishly try to assemble a majority by negotiating with blocs of unpledged or loosely committed delegates. It is politics on the model of a Middle Eastern suq, where almost anything is possible if the price is right.

| Farfetched? With just 185 committed delegates selected by this week, it might seem implausible that insiders are already concocting deadlock scenarios. But the delegate arithmetic is as compelling as it is complex. Dust off the pocket calculator and hang on for the next two paragraphs. The climb may be a bit arduous, but the panoramic view of Democratic disarray is worth it. Remember, the goal is to win a 2,081-delegate majority.

By March 9, a total of 1,662 pledged delegates (40%) will have been chosen in 26 states and American Samoa. With a four-way split in the South and a beleaguered Paul Simon wanly vowing to straggle on, the leading contender is unlikely to have much more than 500 delegates. Soon to be up for grabs are 644 unpledged "superdelegates" -- Senators, Congressmen, Governors and party officials. Even if three-quarters of these mostly ex officio delegates eventually flock to the front runner, he will still be about 1,100 votes short of victory.

Under these projections, a winning candidate would have to sweep the roughly 1,850 delegates still to be awarded in the remaining primaries and caucuses after Super Tuesday. By then it is quite possible that the field will be narrowed to three serious contenders: most likely Dukakis, Jackson and the winner of the Gephardt-Gore grudge match. Even though he cannot be nominated under any conventional reckoning, Jackson would still drain off, say, 300 delegates. This Jesse factor creates an almost Olympian hurdle: the front runner would have to collect about 1,100 -- or more than two-thirds -- of the remaining 1,550 non-Jackson delegates. But that threshold runs right up against the contrary nature of the Democratic electorate. Both Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Walter Mondale in 1984 lost rather than gained support in the late primaries, as voters almost recoiled against their presumptive nominations.

If no contender has won a majority by the time the last delegate chooses sides, it might seem that the fight would automatically go to a dramatic second ballot in Atlanta. But party rules give rival campaigns free rein to barter and bargain for delegates, even those formally pledged to other candidates. All delegates can switch their allegiance at any time and vote their conscience on the convention floor.

These are the contours of a daunting Democratic deadlock. Dukakis, Gephardt and Gore would each bring distinct advantages to any end-game maneuvering. With $4 million already in the bank, and having vaulted into the lead over the weak Democratic field in a national TIME poll conducted last week, Dukakis is the only contender at present who is capable of waging a national campaign.

The 644 superdelegates are Gephardt's ace in the hole. "We've worked the congressional superdelegates very hard," says Campaign Manager Bill Carrick, "and we've also been very aggressive with ((Democratic National Committee)) members." Gore is banking on the widespread assumption that as a Southern moderate, he would be the party's strongest contender in November. But that reputation can only be sustained by a decisive victory over Gephardt in the South.

Would-be power brokers, especially former Party Chairman Robert Strauss, have for months been eagerly theorizing about a looming stalemate, and presumably fantasizing about their own behind-the-scenes roles. Some of this speculation is merely a reflection of Mario-mania, even though Cuomo dismisses a convention-draft movement as "silly talk." But there is a subtext of dissatisfaction with the apparent weakness of the leading contenders. "This is by far the best chance we've had since 1976," says Democratic Campaign Consultant Mark Siegel. "We should be running our best people, and I'm afraid we're not."

Active candidates rather than coyly reticent refuseniks are the most likely beneficiaries of any postprimary swap meet. The logic is that the contenders will have squandered far too much treasure and blood to step aside obediently for a Cuomo, Bill Bradley or Sam Nunn. With party bosses an archaic relic of the past and with Democrats suspicious of almost all forms of authority, only the candidates themselves will have large numbers of delegates with which to negotiate. After Simon's crippling third-place finish in New Hampshire, that calculation remains his only possible rationale for clinging to the race. If the verdict from Super Tuesday is not clear, argues Paul Maslin, the candidate's pollster, "then people may think that a vote for Simon is a vote to keep the process open."

How might a bartered nomination actually be secured? No one should have the temerity to predict the details of the Democratic race four months from now, but several scenarios seem the most plausible.

The Last Train from Paris. This is perhaps the oldest gambit in the political playbook. When Mondale found himself some 40 delegates shy of the nomination the morning after the California primary, he adroitly worked the % phones to secure enough delegate commitments to put him over the top. Few politicians can resist grabbing the last seat on the victory express, especially when there is the hope of a reward for their last-minute conversion. At the moment, Dukakis seems best positioned to take advantage of this all-aboard argument.

The Jackson Fraction. There is no more likely Democratic kingmaker than the party's tribune for the poor and the dispossessed. With the potential to win nearly 1,000 delegates, Jackson could be in a position to anoint almost any candidate as the nominee. True, some of his most prominent supporters, such as Campaign Co-Chairman Willie Brown, may be playing their own games. But more than most candidates, Jackson is likely to hold the allegiance of his delegates. Small wonder that his rivals treat him with extreme deference, and each seems secretly to hope he can barter for Jackson's support. Gore is convinced that he has developed a unique rapport with Jackson. Gephardt talks about naming him to lead an antidrug crusade or serve as a trouble-shooting foreign envoy.

The Dream Ticket. The vice-presidential nomination remains a potent bargaining chip, tarnished though the prize sometimes seems. Marriages of convenience among the candidates have an obvious logic. But if a contender were just shy of nomination, he might use the job to secure the support of a key Governor like James Blanchard of Michigan.

This shadow of uncertainty hovers over the Democrats. New Hampshire decided almost nothing, save for protecting Dukakis from Simon in the scattered liberal bastions of the South. As long as the race remains Balkanized, speculation about a bartered nomination -- or even a brokered convention -- will continue to undercut the leading contenders. That seems the price the Democrats must pay for too many candidates and too little popularity.

With reporting by Michael Duffy and Steven Holmes/Manchester