SACRAMENTO — Like ancient feuding neighbors forced together by a common threat, the state Republican and Democratic parties are running to douse a political wildfire: Proposition 198, the open primary initiative on Tuesday's ballot.
To hear the parties describe it, Proposition 198 would make them almost useless by blurring their messages and diluting party affiliations.
Nothing of the kind, counter the initiative's supporters, primarily moderate Republicans who are hoping to recapture some of their lost political clout.
The measure, they say, would bring moderate voters back into the parties' fold at the expense of rigid ideology. That is needed, they argue, because the major parties are increasingly being dominated by their political extremes--liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.
In a ballot pamphlet supporting Proposition 198, three chief advocates say the current system tends to reward "party hard-liners . . . and stacks the deck against more moderate problem-solvers."
"The open primary will increase participation by giving voters a real choice and by forcing candidates to focus on issues, not just partisanship," say the backers, former state Sen. Rebecca Morgan, a Republican from Los Altos Hills; retired UC Berkeley professor Eugene C. Lee; and Dan Stanford, former chairman of the state Fair Political Practices Commission.
But opponents--including the leaders of the two major political parties--argue that an open primary defeats the basic purpose of a primary election, which is to allow parties to choose their own nominees for the fall general elections.
"Proposition 198 is a cynical attempt by a few self-serving politicians to twist the rules of California's electoral process to advance their own careers," said Republican state Chairman John Herrington and his former Democratic counterpart, Bill Press, in a joint statement opposing the measure.
Under the proposed system, all voters would receive the same ballot in the primary, which is held to select party nominees to run in the November general elections.
For example, if the open primary were in effect this year, a registered Democrat could vote for Bob Dole, Patrick J. Buchanan or some other Republican for president, or for that matter, for Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate. Or a Republican could vote for President Bill Clinton, or his one rival on the primary ballot, Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.
