Fiddling with the order of the primaries is about money: it's about forcing the tee vee stations and the candidates to spend money in your state instead of some other state. Iowa at least forces a kind of labor-intensive campaign on the candidates, and New Hampshire wants to see their faces, but in the big states no matter when they have the vote it's all going to be about money.

The whole idea about having early primaries that would expose the faces and the speeches and give money a chance to be spent wisely on politicians who were performing in public is lost when you turn the primaries into a giant bum's rush. What you get instead is a REAL primary that happens in the months before the official season, when the skybox crowd gets its own early game and makes its own decisions. At least that was the way things were supposed to be, in the old New World with which Slate's Experts would be happiest: before Dean and the internet: before things started going wrong.

The argument now between Clinton and Obama both is and is not a repeat of the Mondale-Hart contest. Hart was supposed to be new and wasn't, and was supposed to have new ideas, but didn't. Hart had, after all, managed the McGovern campaign (and did a remarkably bad job at it). He'd had his moment of cathexis with Warren Beatty (a movie star and a political wonk meet and decide they want to be each other and, for a little while, are). So why were Hart's flaws such a surprise?

It's tempting for the Clinton people to try making the case that Obama is another Gary Hart, but his narrative arc is totally different: it's actually a lot like hers, if you pretend (as she seems, much of the time to do) that you can put all her time as The Wife in brackets. So who's the Hart, here? The DLC longs for a new Hart: he was the candidate of their golden youth. If they could only get Paul to run as a Democrat...

And of course, there's also no Reagan waiting in the wings. The republicans can't decide between Grumpy, Sneezy and Dopy. And is there a Mondale here? At the beginning and end of that 1984 season, Mondale was the best, and then he got beaten by a clown.