Kos is wrong. I'm not normally one to get all argumentative, but, on this one, Kos is endorsing the path that makes worse the very things he wants to avoid.
This primary calendar makes the early states the absolute arbiters of who will be the nominee, and it does a lot of other bad things besides ...
Back in 2003, the story of the Democratic calendar was how front-loaded it was. You had Iowa and NH, and then the primaries started coming fast and furious. I think that was a disaster.
The result of that was a nominee chosen on the very first day, in a caucus in a rural state. And here's the reason: there was no time to break the momentum Kerry got from that early win.
We're weird here. Most people don't hear much of anything about the nominees until 2008. And then, the first thing they really hear is the result in Iowa. The press covers the victory, with lots of analysis on why the winner won, which is, naturally, very favorable to the winner. So the positive press completely overwhelms everything else because there's no way anyone can build a national campaign before that time. So the earned media from the win dominates the next few weeks, leading to a string of victories. There's no "firebreak" to stop that kind of momentum.
The importance of that momentum can't be overstated. In that kind of environment, political ads pale in power to earned media and "water-cooler" conversations about the result. There's simply no time before 2008 to build up the kind of connection between a candidate and a voter to overcome the positive push from a few victories. People just don't tune in enough before that. A candidate can't decide, "Oh, I'll focus on South Carolina, and Florida, and NJ, and (pick another couple states) and we'll go from there." They just can't get enough traction if people aren't paying attention, and they won't be.
Now, we make 2004 look drawn-out. We have four primaries in the early states, and then, boom, we pick the nominee (essentially). If someone can win Iowa and Nevada, they take the whole enchilada, no question. He or she will just ride the momentum through NH and probably SC, and then it's completely over. Good night, hope all the staffers have the resumes handy.
This is a terrible thing. Caucuses are not normal events. They reward a specific kind of organization, backroom deals (like Edwards and Kucinich), and other fairly arcane tactics. And now we're deciding our nominee in essentially two caucuses.
Also, we have no time for anyone to test their message and hone their campaign. The Clinton campaign of 1992 was sorely tested in NH with their loss, and Tsongas had huge momentum. But the much slower pace of the primary gave the Clinton team time to block Tsongas's momentum, hone their campaign, and take the nomination. It made the nominee MUCH stronger.
By contrast, all John Kerry had to do to win the nomination is play up his service and "electability," watch Dean implode, have Michael Whooley set up a good Iowa operation ... and he was in. But the voters at large never had time to figure out that his message was kind of vague. He may have been the nominee in the end, anyway, but he would have been much better prepared for the general election.
That's what could happen this time as well. We need to put the eventual nominee to the test, giving the field time to experience shifts in momentum to respond to changes in dynamics. That's what a general election campaign is all about. It's a multi-month war of attrition, and a campaign needs to be ready for that.
But this primary calendar doesn't do that job.
Now, it's possible that a variety of people will win the first four states (I could easily see it going Edwards, Richardson, Obama in the first three), in which case things will get totally screwy. But it's still not a good battleground. It'll just be confusing, rather than a test of the ability of a campaign to adept and strengthen itself.
While I share Kos's goal of lessening the importance of NH and Iowa (and I say that as a guy who grew up in NH and with parents still living there), this is not the way to do it. The only ways to do it is to either spread out the calendar more, institute a system where the first states rotate, or put more states on the same day as NH and/or Iowa, not just after (I know all about NH's constitution, but they just have to deal). This current schedule is the worst of all worlds, with the disadvantages of the early state mess and the problems of a national caucus, with none of the advantages of either.
edit: Please take a look at this comment by Elwood ... as much as we can complain about this, there is a limit to what can be done about it ...