From the transcript of Meet the Press today, comes this...

MR. RUSSERT: David Broder, we all thought we were going to go to Boston in the last week of July for the nomination of John Kerry. And now a trial balloon has been floated by the campaign of the Democratic candidate, saying, "Well, we'll probably have a Democratic rally there and a great event, but he may not formally accept the nomination of his party," because he can then delay having to receive public campaign funding until, say, Labor Day and continue to raise a lot of other hard money, contributions which will allow him to compete with George Bush. What's going on?

MR. BRODER: What's going on is money, money, money. I have to say that we used to blame Republicans as being the party where money really drove everything. It's the Democrats that are allowing money to drive everything. They moved up the primary campaign dates so that they could have more time in the spring to raise money. Now, they want to move back the nomination time so they can raise more money in the fall. It is ridiculous. They are destroying institution after institution of political significance by this preoccupation with chasing money.

Ken Melman from the Bush campaign called yesterday and said, "If the networks go along with this scheme and cover the four nights of the Democratic Convention as a political rally, which does not produce a nomination, we will demand four nights of coverage of our rallies there." And I said to him, "Why don't you just move your date back? You have the president defer his accepting the nomination for another five weeks, and then you can go on raising money, and we'll end up with two parties, neither of which has an official nominee, and Ralph Nader will be the only candidate out there."