Hunt:… you share with me the feeling that what we are doing here is very important, that it is going to have a real bearing on our Party and on this country and on how we fare ahead. I think we need to make our system work better to select our presidential nominee, and we are going to be working on that, and that is the charge to this Commission.

But I think in the process—and I would urge you to think about this and bear this in mind as we go through all of this—I think in the process of conducting the work of this Commission we must and will be sending a signal to many disaffected Democrats—and there are many of them throughout this country—that this Party is open to them, that we will hear every voice in it, and that we will choose a presidential candidate that represents the hopes and aspirations of the majority of all Democrats in this country.

The sending of that signal, what we are doing in this Commission is I think in a sense is going to be looked at as the beginning of the come-back of the Democratic Party, with perhaps a symbolism far beyond the real importance of what we do.

Now, I think it is sort of tempting when you get together in a Commission of this kind and everybody is polite to everybody and all of that, as we of course should be, I think it is sort of easy to begin to let some of the problems fade away. I hope that that will not happen. The real truth is that we have problems in our nominating process, but they are problems that we can change, that we can do something about.

I believe very strongly—and all of us come to this work with some ideas, with some feelings, with some commitments within our hearts and minds—I believe, for example, that too many Democratic elected officials have been left out of our system and have been left out of our convention. Over 20 years, the percentage of Democratic United States Senators who were delegates to the convention dropped from 90 percent to 18 percent, and the percentage of Democratic United States Representatives and Governors dropped by one half.

I think it is essential that we include those elected officials again, that we building to our process their broad-based understanding and their appeal and their constituencies—and they all have them. And I would submit to you if you put all those constituencies together, you do have a majority of the voters in this country.

I would say to you—and we certainly are not about to prejudge what we should do or how we should go about it, but I just sort of have a dream within my heart that the 1984 convention would have something that I suspect no other national political party convention has ever had, and that is sitting within it, active within it, every…