Election Excess.

By David Von Drehle

You'd never know by looking, but there is a logic behind the presidential nominating process. The tiny Iowa caucuses give little-known long shots a chance to build a name through sweat equity. Compact New Hampshire tests the retail skills of the candidates. Elections in South Carolina and Nevada take the show south of the gnat line and west of the Rockies. And then Super Tuesday--the big time.

At some point along the way, though, the theories of political insiders collide with the physical realities of time, space and human endurance. That's when the logic starts to go haywire. The candidates grow hoarse and punchy. The well-crafted speeches devolve into strings of half-garbled sound bites. Yesterday's gaffe vanishes in the cloud of today's dustup. Who can keep track? It's a morning rally in St. Louis, noontime in St. Paul, nighttime in San Diego, and--saints preserve us--the campaign suddenly has all the coherence of Alice in Wonderland shouted from a speeding bus or airplane.

So it's not the concept of Super Tuesday that produces the sort of spectacular jumble Americans witnessed in recent days. It's the slapdash execution. "In and of itself, Super Tuesday is fine," said former Senator John Danforth of Missouri, a voice of logic, as the cacophony crescendoed. "But if you're going to have something like this, then candidates should have more than a week to campaign in 20-odd states."

Tell us again why the Ames straw poll deserves 10 times the attention from candidates that the entire California primary gets. Remind us why Concord has the candidates for a year and Colorado for an hour? Time to dust off those proposals for rationally paced, regional primaries, proposals that recur like clockwork every four years in the exhausted wake of another Super Tuesday.

On the other hand, there's something undeniably heady, if not entirely logical, about a supercharged Super Week of Super Bowl and Super Tuesday--something to remind an increasingly gloomy country that for Americans, nothing succeeds like excess. Surely there's a better way to pick a President. But would any other way be quite so rumbustiously ours?