Steven Taylor links a piece in today’s New York Times that looks at Terry McAuliffe’s plan to create a consensus nominee by front-loading the primary calendar. The plan looks likely to backfire by producing a presumptive nominee who is, according to writer Adam Nagourney, “bruised by the nominating fight and confronted with the challenge of uniting a deeply divided party.”

It doesn’t exactly help that many of the candidates’ strategies have, of late, focused on pitting Democratic factions against each other, with Clark’s recent attempts to play to African-Americans against Dean, Gephardt’s appeals to the unions, and Dean’s nonsensical—and continual—alienation of the party’s centrist and conservative elements.

John Fund argues in his OpinionJournal Political Diary column today that James Carville and Terry McAuliffe created Howard Dean’s candidacy—a phenomenon already noted this week by The New York Times, as I discussed here. Then again, if you didn’t see it in the Times—which probably describes most Wall Street Journal readers—it’s new to you! Fund gets into the mechanics:

[Moving the Iowa and New Hampshire contests to January] meant holiday-distracted voters would have only a few weeks to pay attention to the actual race once the New Year’s bubbly wore off. That meant that for all of 2003, liberal party activists were in the driver’s seat when it came to deciding who would raise the most money and be anointed the front-runner in media coverage. That turned out to be Mr. Dean, who tapped into activist rage over the Bush administration’s war in Iraq and lingering anger over the disputed Florida recount in 2000.

But while “Bush loathing” is almost universal among Democratic partisans, it resonates with only about 20% of the electorate. Many of the people who don’t approve of Mr. Bush’s handling of his job are turned off by bitter attacks against him.

As something of a neo-institutionalist (despite my behaviorist credentials), the Fund-Nagourney thesis is pretty compelling. But I think the nature of the primary process in and of itself lets strong partisans set the tone for the general election campaign, even if they don’t always capture the nomination—consider the Buchanan insurgency against Bush 41 in 1992, which arguably helped kill Bush’s general election prospects. Even if we were talking about a traditional nominating schedule, Dean would be well-positioned to win, although the compressed schedule does make it less likely for the candidate who emerges from Iowa and New Hampshire to face a strong challenger when the campaign swings into the more populous—and arguably more typical—states.

Fundamentally, despite the “superdelegates” and other mechanisms implemented by the DNC to try to manipulate primary results to select electable nominees, a process that has only succeeded in a contested primary once since 1976, the Democrats have had a process that lends itself to capture by the strongest partisans since the McGovern Commission reforms in the early 1970s, which expanded the use of primaries by the Democrats, effects that were further enhanced by Jesse Jackson’s insistence on proportional delegate allocation after his relatively strong showing in the 1984 primaries didn’t translate into many delegates to the convention.

Link via Martin Devon, who has more on Howard Dean’s self-inflicted gaffes from an interview with Howard Fineman in this week’s Newsweek.