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right. Okay. Thank you very much. Mark Shields for a delightful presentation. And I've been true great farm that you always bring with you to These forums are next Panelist is a distinguished colleague in the United States Senate. A former governor of one of the fastest growing states, of course in the United States.

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A founding member of the Democratic Leadership Council serving on our board of directors, One of the architects of Super Tuesday. He brings with him a great pragmatic experience from the State House. Now, of course, in the United States Senate, please join me in welcoming Senator Bob Graham.

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Bob, thank you very much, John. I appreciate the chance to be here and talk about the two questions of one why Southern Regional Primary and second let you be the report card of its success or failure to pick up on the comments of Mark. I believe in the victim that creativity is the art of disguising one sources.

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I do not believe that we need to disguise the source of the idea of the regional primary. It is not a matter of broadening the base of Democrats. It is the issue of transferring the base of Democrats transferring it from our broad success at the local, state and congressional level to success at the presidential level, we essentially have had a political war in this country, a warp which has resulted in the kinds of statistics that Mark has just stated in terms of our success at the local level.

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A warp which resulted in our region last year in the Democrats, successfully defending through John Breaux in a very difficult race in Louisiana are seat there and capturing four seats, which had belonged to Republicans in the U. S Senate in other Southern states, while at the same time our region in 1984 had gone overwhelmingly for Ronald Reagan in my State of Florida, Democrats have not carried a majority of the vote for president United States since Franklin Roosevelt.

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Other than the two times when there was a Southerner on the ballot in 1964 and 1976. I believe that the rationale of the Southern regional primary has to be dealt with in the inverse order of those words. The most important word is the word primary, because what primary infers is that we at the presidential level are going to do what we have been doing at a state local level, and that is appealing directly to the desires, the hopes, the aspirations of individual voters, as opposed to appealing to those voters through organized interest groups.

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If you had the job of being the campaign manager for any presidential candidate in 1984 and you were asked to lay out a strategy paper of how you would go about electing your candidate, what would you do? Has professional, sophisticated political strategist You would go to those early states, find out what groups in the past had been influential in getting voters to the polls in a primary or to the caucuses in those caucus states.

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Find out what those groups were interested in. And miraculously, you would determine that your candidate exactly fit the agenda of interest of those particular groups, and you would go from state to state following that particular tactic, it would be in like the shoe salesman who had 5000 boxes of shoes to sell, and he started selling his shoes in Iowa, and he ended up in California.

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The problem was, the 5000 bucks went off the shelf at the last primary, he may have been able to have captured enough delegates who have been nominated at the party's convention, but there was an empty store left to be sold to the American people in November.

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So I think the most important aspect of the Southern regional primary is the fact that we are going to get all of the states on a primary system which will cause the candidates to have to go directly to the voters with a message that will be appealing to those voters with a message that will galvanize the interests of those voters in March.

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So if there's a chance that those people will come back in November and vote Democratic, the second is the word. Regional regional will help us to have a more efficient system efficient and not only the sense that candidates won't have to move so far from voter to voter, but also efficient in that it is going to make it more feasible for candidates to utilize effective modern means of communication in order to get their messages across.

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Uh, we are a region which has been increasingly a media dominated politics at the state and local level. This will facilitate allowing that same ability to reach individual voters through the kinds of experiences that we're going to share. Tonight broadly listened and watched debate as well as the other forms of political communication.

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The least important word in Southern Regional primary is the word Southern. It was an accident of history that the Southern states have had a long tradition of working together, and that just does not go back to waiting for Robert E. Lee to come back from his coffee break.

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Uh, we were the first region to organize a compact for education. The Southern Governors Association is the oldest regional organization of state political leadership in this country. Uh, that tradition of cooperative interstate action made the South the most logical region for this idea to first occur.

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We also a region highly frustrated by what had happened in 1984 and beyond. But the regional concept is not intended to parochial eyes American politics, because in many ways the issues of the future for America are issues that the South has felt first and with a particularly important impact issues such as international competitiveness in the region of the world which from Thomas Jefferson's time has been the most international in terms of economic outlook.

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The needs of an increasingly elderly population in the region of the country, which has the two states with the highest proportion of citizens over 65. The region of the world which has of our country, which has had a particular interest in national defense and the security of our borders.

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Those are not just Southern issues. Those are national issues, those kind of issues that presidential candidates are going to have to speak to effectively in order to be successful in the hour region, which means to be electable in November. What should be the report card, the standards by which we judge the success or failure of the Southern regional primary?

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I'd like to suggest five briefly, one which I think has already been met. It has the fact that there was a block of states early in the process as opposed to the system in 1984 which was a scatter ation of Southern states from March to June primaries and caucus.

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The fact that we have this new system has it resulted in some candidates who would otherwise have already been eliminated, being able to continue their campaign. Clearly the answer to that is yes. And we're going to hear from some of those candidates tonight who, but for the fact of the Southern regional primary, would have had to have withdrawn.

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Second, will we hear the candidates speaking to a broader range of issues with a more pragmatic as opposed to ideological approach, with a greater attention to the kinds of concerns that I mentioned as being especially significant today to the South and setting the future for America in the next decade?

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The answer to that is yes. And again, we're going to hear that this evening. The third question will be answered on March the 3rd March the eighth. And that is that. Will there be a significant participation in the Southern regional primary in 1980 for less than 15% of the Democrats in the South felt that the presidential selection process was sufficiently important to them to participate less than 15%.

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We will have a substantially greater participation on March the eighth, and that will be the generator of greater interest by Democrats in the selection of the president in November and fourth. The test will come on November of this year. When we asked the question, Will our candidate who was selected in Atlanta be electable and particularly, will he be electable?

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With the support of Southern states? And finally, over the next 4 to 8 years, we can track the success of the Southern regional primary as to whether it becomes a nationwide new method of organizing America for the selection of presidential candidates. I personally hope that by 1992 in 1996 that we see a pattern of 46 regional primaries across the country, uh, providing the same advantage.

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A direct appeal to voters in organized and efficient manner. Talk about the agenda that's important to the American people that we will experience on March the eighth in the South. I'm excited. I think that we have an opportunity to provide another example, uh, Southern service to America.

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Maintaining the proud tradition which began, uh, in this, uh, city of the natural superiority Southern politicians. Thanks, Peter. Thanks very much, Bob.