This weekend the Democratic National Committee’s rules committee meets to decide whether to seat the disputed delegations from Michigan and Florida at the national convention. It seems natural enough now, but the idea of the national party making rulings on how states pick delegates was novel 40 years ago. In the wake of the 1968 nominating convention, a group formed to move the party from the era of state power brokers to a more open and representative system of selecting national delegates from the 50 states.

“It was the first time really at the national level they tried to impose rules on the states,” Don Fraser told the Minnesota Monitor Wednesday. Fraser would know: The then-U.S. representative from Minnesota’s 5th District (and future Minneapolis mayor) had been appointed a member of the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection. He rose to chairman after the commission’s first chair, Sen. George McGovern, resigned to run for president in 1972. The group became known to history as the McGovern-Fraser Commission; people called its reforms the McGovern-Fraser Rules.

(See video for brief clips from interview with Fraser.)

Frustrated backers of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign instigated the effort. The commission set out to free the nomination and delegate selection process from high fees, strict or nearly secret rules, and discrimination on the basis of gender, race, age or national origin. Many states diluted participation via methods of enforced consensus such as voting by proxy, unit rules (by which the majority binds the whole group), “automatic” delegates, candidate slates and the like. In Georgia, Fraser recalls, “The party chair picked all the delegates, and the governor picked the party chair, so in effect it was a one-man-show.”

The commission made rules to put a stop to these practices and, with Fraser in charge, set about persuading states to change their ways. Many, he said, took the easy way out by adopting presidential primaries. Only 17 states had presidential primaries before the McGovern-Fraser Rules took effect in 1972; the commission often gets blamed for (among other things) their spread since. “A majority of the people on that commission preferred caucuses,” Fraser said. “They didn’t exactly like primaries, and if they thought they had the authority to, they would have maybe limited primaries in some fashion. No one expected the surge in the numbers of primaries that took place.”  

More commissions followed over the years, though none attained the watershed status of McGovern-Fraser. The advent of superdelegates in the 1980s, ominously undemocratic in some eyes, strikes Fraser as demonstrably harmless. Officeholders and party VIPs indeed avoid runoffs with common folk for delegate slots, but they seem to follow the will of their constituents, Fraser said. The biggest problem he sees is the election season timetable, with states giving in to what he calls “chamber of commerce” ambitions to move up on the primary election calendar. Which brings us to this weekend, in which the national party grapples with states that set their own schedules — the last act in a contest between an establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, and a challenger, Barack Obama, whose campaign, Fraser figures, got this far thanks to reforms from 40 years ago.