A dispute between the Democratic National Committee and Florida Democrats shows how broken the presidential primary system has become.

The DNC ordered the Florida Democratic Party to move back its planned Jan. 29 primary or lose the state's 210 delegates to next year's party convention. The action is intended to prevent Florida and other states from leapfrogging ahead of traditional early primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire.

If the Florida Democratic Party doesn't comply, it would turn the presidential primary in the nation's fourth-largest state into a meaningless "beauty contest." Some candidates might campaign there. Others might not bother.

The state Democrats say their hand was forced by the Republican-led legislature, which has scheduled a property-tax referendum for Jan. 29. Demo-crats want to defeat the measure and seek the turnout a presidential primary would produce.

Regardless of Florida's internal political intrigue, the DNC's action demonstrates that the national parties need to adopt a more orderly system of primaries to nominate presidential candidates. The rush by states to hold earlier primaries, and thus exert more political clout, is getting out of hand. The parties' nominees may be decided by early February.

That has a number of bad effects. It ratchets up the importance of raising money for television ads, the only way to compete in a primary season compressed into a few, feverish weeks. It increases the chance that a party will pick a nominee based on a brief infatuation, not full scrutiny. It creates far too long a general election campaign.

In the absence of a national primary plan, states can't be blamed for taking action on their own. New Jersey, which formerly held an irrelevant presidential primary in June, has moved its election in 2008 to Feb. 5, a key date. So many other states have chosen the same date that pundits are calling it "Tsunami Tuesday."

It's too late to restore order in 2008. But the national parties, perhaps with the help of a national commission, should devise a sensible system for 2012.

One of the leading proposals is the so-called America plan. It would create clusters of primaries, starting with smaller states, where candidates usually don't need to spend huge sums to compete. This proposal would hold 10 rounds of primaries, separated by two-week intervals, with bigger states generally voting in the latter stages. The order of states would be selected at random.

Another worthy idea is regional primaries. Under this option, regional groupings of states would hold primaries each month, with the order of regions changing every four years. It's fair to states, but could make it more difficult for unknown candidates to compete.

The flap in Florida shows it's time for the national parties to devise a more orderly system, instead of enforcing a haphazard calendar on a state-by-state basis.