In the Washington Post today, E.J. Dionne gently mocks the Democrats’ Commission on Presidential Nomination Timing and Scheduling:

When the going gets tough, Democrats form commissions.

It’s an old habit: If an election is lost, there must be some fix in the party’s rules and procedures that will turn things around.

The commission is co-chaired by Rep. David Price (D-NC), who is my Congressman and a professor in Duke’s department of political science (where I’m a graduate student). Dionne praises Price, but urges the commission to examine larger questions about Democratic “values, ideas and policies.” This is silliness. A commission is not the way to address those questions; does anyone think that Price could actually change the party’s values or policies by issuing a report? The changes that are needed will take time and happen in a necessarily decentralized and chaotic way; the process can’t be managed from above.

More importantly, when Dionne belittles procedural reform, he’s missing a crucial point. From a small-d democratic perspective, the front-loaded nomination process is a bad thing. It creates a bandwagon dynamic based on a few primaries in small states, preventing most party members from having a voice in the choosing of the nominee. And from a tactical perspective, the nominee that emerges is not battle-tested, which ends up hurting them in the end. In 2004, John Kerry essentially won the nomination over the course of a month as a result of positioning himself as the viable candidate who was not Howard Dean. He never had to establish a winning positive message, and he paid dearly for it in the general election. Of course, that’s not the only reason he lost, but the way in which he was chosen so quickly did not help him or the Democrats.

Let’s hope Price ignores Dionne and focuses on reforming a process that badly needs it.