Looking to Super Tuesday

...But these points are too fine to be decisive in the process of electing the highest official in a transcontinental democracy where half the population can't locate Nicaragua on the map...

...The first is that the campaigns start too early, tiring the candidates and boring the voters...

...Gephardt and Simon left New Hampshire in debt...

...They can't get elected, but in continuing the race they have nothing to lose except their credit ratings-a loss John Glenn suffered in 1984 that didn't prevent his re-election to the Senate in 1986...

...But Faulkner country is also the home of Martin Luther King Jr...

...Bruce Babbitt, winner of the 1988 Mr...

...Iowa and New Hampshire brought out positive qualities in each man, too...

...This is especially important, because with 172 media markets on Super Tuesday, no candidate, however well-heeled, will be able to rely as extensively on commercials or voter-turnout phone banks as he did in Iowa and New Hampshire...

...As a result, voters next fall will face as clear a conservative-liberal contrast as is possible between centrist nominees...

...He need not have...

...Some negative stereotypes of the survivors were etched during the first phase of the primaries and caucuses...

...Since only six major Presidential candidates are left (and the count may be five if Simon doesn't win in Minnesota or South Dakota on March 1), the television networks will be able to display them in longer than three-second snippets as voters prepare to pick delegates March 8 in 20 states-14 of them in or bordering on the South...

...and nasa's Mission Control, and the metropolitan South has been internationalized by foreign investors, growing exports and geography...

...George Bush or Robert Dole will be the Republican nominee...

...In a position to keep them honest, if they so choose, will be three gadflies: Democrat Jesse Jackson and Republicans Jack Kemp and Pat Robertson...

...Bush isn't a quitter, hates to grandstand...

...Super Tuesday will offer what a bipartisan group of Southern leaders, the day after the New Hampshire primary, proudly spoke of as a chance to cross-examine the contenders on "national issues with a Southern accent.' Yet, as John Anderson, the former Republican and former independent who knows all about losing Presidential bids, said on the night of the New Hampshire primary: "The specificity of a candidate is in inverse proportion to his standings in the polls...

...Integrity award, and Gary Hart, one of whose new ideas turned out to be rather old, are out...

...Still, Super Tuesday is extremely unlikely to decide the nomination in either party...

...The differences brought out early within each party were minimal -dancing distinctions reflected on the head of a pin...

...The second complaint is that the campaigns end too early, that "frontloading" leaves nothing to be decided by the time the later primaries and caucuses are held...

...What about the issues...

...Americans are electing a chief executive, not a chief librarian...

...The South remains the most rural part of the U.S., with 37 per cent of its residents living outside metropolitan areas...

...Some of the arguments seemed concocted, like the one between Dole and Bush over whether to order ideas from the Reagan arms control menu à la carte or prix fixe...

...Anderson regretted that political fact of life...

...On the Republican side, Bush, the awkward patrician, irritates...

...Blacks, most women and unionists are sticking with the Democrats...

...Others, like the Democratic debate over whether opposition to military aid for the Nicaraguan contras should be extended to nonlethal aid, concern important points...

...The assault upon Republican regulars, however, is national in scope...

...Gephardt is methodical, willing to change his mind...

...Well, the Democrats are all liberals and the Republicans are all conservatives...

...Simon's compassion, like Jackson's empathy, flows across racial lines...

...Moreover, they are doing so under a system that works pretty well...

...Recent tests of public sentiment-such as the election in 1986 of liberal senators, the grassroots opposition in 1987 to Judge Robert H. Bork's nomination for the Supreme Court, and surveys this year of the South's attitudes on issues ranging from the Reagan-Gorbachev intermediate nuclear missile treaty to Federally subsidized day care-indicate that Southern exceptionalism continues to wane...

...Two gripes about the system have circulated widely in recent years...

...Other hopefuls have been sunk...

...Outside the mainstream, yet inside their parties' boundaries, the purists have gained enough prominence to keep the frontrunners on target ideologically...

...Robertson's charismatic Protestants are flowing into the Southern GOP, which scares the bejesus out of Reaganites who took over most of the state parties a dozen years ago...

...Super Tuesday probably will not distort the campaign either...

...Miami is closer to Cuba and Houston is closer to Central America than either city is to Washington, D.C...

...That doesn't seem to apply to the current race...

...In 1987, the polls hardly moved from New Year's to the day after Christmas, when Gephardt's commercials went on the air in Iowa...

...On the Democratic side, Richard Gephardt, Michael Dukakis and two long shots, Albert Gore and Paul Simon, emerged from the two test-track states as candidates who could conceivably become their Party's standard bearer...

...Pete Du Pont, hobbled ironically by money troubles, was able to last only a little longer than Al Haig, the first loser to admit he could read the writing on the wall...

...cry the voices in the wilderness...

...After testing the character, strategic and organizational ability, and personal appeal of 13 candidates, they cut the field of potential Presidents in half...

...Andrew Mollison is a national correspondent for the Cox Newspapers...

...Kemp holds open the Republican door for paycheck workers, white and black, who walked out of the Republican party a half century ago...

...Again, this year, at least, that is not the case...

...Dole likes to think before he commits himself, doesn't equate wealth with merit...

...The doomed survivors, Jackson, Robertson and Kemp should be allowed in a few more Presidential debates, even though there is no chance of their winning the nomination this year...

...Moreover, roughly 60 per cent of the delegates in each party won't be chosen until later in other states...

...Dukakis has Massachusetts in his pocket, Gore has Tennessee, Gephardt has Missouri, Bush has Texas, and Dole has eastern Missouri to head of f a total Super Tuesday wipeout...

...With fewer candidates, more than one-liners will be needed to discuss public concerns...

...Even voters in California and New Jersey, whose officials do their best to avoid party squabbles by holding back their primary until the first week of June, seem almost certain to have a say...

...Gore's jokes and proposals aren't canned...

...Robertson, the Richard Nixon of the religious Right, reweaves his past hour by hour, inventing conveniently...

...Dole, the waspish parvenu, lacks vision, pops off...

...Among the Democrats, Gephardt flipflops, Gore flop-flips, Dukakis is breezily consistent, Simon drones, Jackson is too glib...

...Kemp is a Jackie one-note, piping a gold bug's dreams...

...Small government, pro-management, pro-defense white men-the wandering lambs whom Southern Democratic leaders were pursuing when they created the quasi-regional primary testwill have a voice in both parties on March 8. They will not have a veto...

...The other four had money, but national spending limits for candidates who take Federal funding mean that they will have to practice during the Super Tuesday campaign the kind of spending restraint and priority-setting they advocate for Federal budgets...

...Robertson actually ushers them in...

...That's three times as many delegates as were at stake in the pre-Super Tuesday states, which in addition to Iowa and New Hampshire will have included Minnesota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Maine, and for the Republicans alone, Hawaii, Nevada, Kansas, South Dakota, Alaska, and South Carolina...

...Dukakis clearly enjoys running things, has learned how to listen...

...If one of them doesn't reassure you, perhaps the other one will...

...The next President of the United States could indeed be determined by the people of California and/or New Jersey...

...In 1986, when the 1988 delegate hunt began with GOP precinct elections in Michigan and Arizona, nobody except a few fanatics even noticed, much less got bored...

...So voters participating in the big day will rely mostly on news coverage, or on what they are told by friends who follow the news, to help them select 28 per cent of the Republican and 30 per cent of the Democratic delegates to the national conventions...

...They have thus made it easier for Super Tuesday voters to learn more about the survivors-six pragmatists who could be President, and three purists whose secondary yet important job will be to keep the platforms this summer and the campaigns next fall true to party principles...