DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

Last week a story appeared in newspapers that probably seemed to most readers to be the ultimate inside-baseball kind of story that politics produces.

South Carolina's Republican Party announced it would hold its presidential primary Jan. 19, 2008, an earlier-than-planned date.

Setting aside the issue of why South Carolina allows its political parties to decide the date of state elections, the decision was the talk of political circles. It portends a speeded-up primary and caucus process next year that could end up producing the Democratic and Republican nominees for president so early that the issues of the campaign are not yet known.

Some background is in order here: In 1968 the process of selecting delegates to the Democratic National Convention was begun so early (Michigan started the ball rolling in 1966) that it was one of the reasons the system was so unresponsive to the potent issues, notably Vietnam, that emerged in that important year.

The Democratic Party ended up adopting a rule for future delegate selection that forbade starting the process before the calendar year of a presidential election. In 1982 the party went further and created a 13-week primary schedule, putting all primaries and caucuses between the second Tuesday in March and the second Tuesday in June. There were two permanent exceptions -- two small states, Iowa and New Hampshire, were permitted to hold their traditional first-in-the-nation caucus (Iowa) and primary (New Hampshire). The Republican Party later developed a similar schedule.

Then last year the Democratic Party approved changes that breached this sensible schedule and allowed Nevada to hold caucuses Jan. 19 (after Iowa Jan. 14 and before the New Hampshire primary Jan. 22) and South Carolina to hold a primary Jan. 29.

January thus became more front-loaded and events were set to run in this order: Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Democratic Party leaders assumed that New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner would sit still for these changes.

They apparently didn't get such an assurance from him. Gardner is required by state law to set the date of his state's primary at least a week before any other "similar election." Whether that language means primaries or also caucuses is within Gardner's discretion.

New Hampshire's tradition as first in the nation goes back to 1920. Iowa's goes back only to 1972. New Hampshire tolerated one caucus state in front of it, but it's unlikely it will tolerate two, demoting New Hampshire to third place.

Soon after Nevada's elevation it was being widely reported that Gardner would move the primary not just ahead of Nevada but also ahead of Iowa. (The South Carolina GOP's decision will already force Gardner to move the date to Jan. 12, ahead of Iowa.)

Then state legislatures started meeting this year. The decision to move Nevada so far forward turned out to be a blunder of monumental proportions. State after state decided that if the long-standing agreement to hold all contests off until later in the year could be broken by party leaders on Nevada's behalf, all wraps were off.

State after state moved its primary date to Feb. 5 (the first date on which other states were allowed to hold events under Democratic Party rules). Soon half the states were holding a quasi-national primary on that date, a super-primary so big and expensive that it made the race for president all about money and may well make it impossible for second-tier candidates to compete.

Then Florida went even further. It leaped over Feb. 5 and scheduled its primary for Jan. 29. Florida is a big population state, and its change made it even more difficult for non-frontrunners, front-loading the process by an order of magnitude.

Now it appears more likely that New Hampshire and possibly Iowa will push their events into 2007. A few states, like Washington, have responsibly resisted jumping on the bandwagon of early events. But most gave no thought to national implications, instead treating delegate selection contests like a form of economic development.

A cascade of criticism has hit the Democratic Party for triggering this fiasco.

Democratic Party leaders may never live down the blunder of violating its prohibition on January contests by foolishly putting Nevada's caucuses into that month.