Florida wants to move its presidential primary up so it can wield greater influence on the national scene &8212; as if the swampy state didn&8217;t get enough attention in the 2000 election. Michigan does too, and now their senators are pushing for federal legislation to change the presidential primary process.

We agree the process needs to be changed, but it shouldn&8217;t be in favor of big states with large populations. And the focus should be on moving the schedule of the entire presidential process down the calendar, not up. Get it in the springtime.

If the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary end up in December, it enters a bad time of year. No one wants election campaigns mixed in with the holidays or with year-end economic decisions. Iowa families already are drowning in political ads.

There&8217;s a greater worry, too: The process would keep moving up until the day comes 20 or 40 years from now when the U.S. presidential race is an unending, ongoing affair.

The fact is, the national parties can solve all this.

In 1981 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the national parties determine the rules governing the presidential nominating process. That means neither the states nor the state parties get to decide when states hold primaries and caucuses. The Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee get to decide when state parties can hold primaries and caucuses.

They could just have all the primaries take place all on the same day. Problem solved.

Of course, because this is politics, the problem wouldn&8217;t be solved because some states, such as Michigan, this year are flaunting the Supreme Court ruling by threatening state legislation. This would only result in more states doing the same thing and ultimately result in lawsuits that likely wouldn&8217;t be resolved until after the primaries are over anyway.

Regardless, here&8217;s an idea for 2012 that is somewhat similar what other pundits suggest: Take the 50 state primaries (or caucuses) and split them into groups of 10. Over the course of five Tuesdays, all the primaries would be held, 10 states at a time. The states would be sorted by size: the 10 smallest states would be together and then the next 10 and so forth. Because the system rotates, each state would get to be among the first 10 primary states every 20 years.

That spreads the early primary money around. That ends the debate over big states versus little ones, and it matches what many others around the country see as a fair system.

As we mentioned, this is politics. Everybody says they want a fair system. It&8217;s just nobody is willing to do it.