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The voters of the country decide who they want to support, and the delegates are elected to also make a determination of who would be in the best interest of the party and the country to be our nominee.

Originally, the main purpose of the convention was to determine who the party would have as the presidential nominee and the vice-presidential nominee.

The most important political task facing the out-of-power party - the Democrats for now - is creating a villain to run against. It's certainly easier than developing some grand new ideas or policies on which to campaign.

The Democratic Party is a house of many mansions. It is a body which is extremely important in representing all kinds of people in all parts of the country who have very broad and very different views.

The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat.

One of the favorite tricks of the Democrats is to try to get the Republicans to pass over their strongest candidate and nominate instead a candidate who will be easy to beat.

We got to make sure that the Democratic Party is not just Democratic, but seen to be Democratic. That means we got to have systems in place that makes sure that everybody who participates in a primary is perceived to have an equal shot with everybody else.

I chaired the 1982 Democratic Party Commission on Presidential Nominations that created certain automatic delegates to the Democratic convention - the 'superdelegates.' It was a good idea then, and it is still a good idea.

Too often, the Democratic Party has been split between its grass-roots activists on one side and its elected officials and party leaders on the other. It's important to remember: We need both wings to fly.

How a candidate runs shapes how a president governs.