The idea that the next Democratic national chairman will determine if the party can reverse its slide toward minority status makes good newspaper copy, but it just ain’t so.

Even if former presidential candidate and Vermont Gov. Howard Dean wins the job, it won’t be a disaster for the Democrats, although his election would reinforce the notion his party has not gotten the 2004 electorate’s message.

Clearly, Democrats must broaden their appeal between the two coasts and beyond blacks, union members, feminists, tree-huggers, gays, anti-war activists, etc.

Dean’s selection wouldn’t do much for that effort, and it would send the wrong signal. But even if Democrats pick abortion-rights opponent Tim Roemer, a former Indiana congressman – and they won’t – or a more moderate candidate than Dean such as Martin Frost, a former Texas congressman, it would not greatly influence the Democrats’ appeal to red-state America anyway.

Simply put, that’s because Americans’ views on the two parties are created by the presidential candidates.

Almost everything else that happens between the quadrennial campaigns, other than a major scandal, recession or war, only minimally affects that question. Also, the out-party chairman can only hope the sitting president makes such mistakes.

In the overall scheme of things, the choice of the next Democratic chair (as it would be the GOP counterpart were the Democrats in power) is unlikely to have much effect outside the Washington Beltway. The party’s congressional leaders have much more clout than the Democratic chair in charting party policies.

Yet with President Bush inaugurated, political reporters (as opposed to those who cover government) don’t have much to do. So the Feb. 12 balloting is billed as the first battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.

That’s a lot more hyperbole than truth. A symbolic victory by the candidate of the left or the center – sorry, no conservatives need apply – would matter if voters were paying attention.

What’s going on now is inside maneuvers that will make virtually no impression on the millions of voters Democrats must to win back. The only way for the Democrats to reverse their recent drop into the abyss of American politics is through their presidential candidate.

That won’t happen until at least 2008. Nothing the new chairman does, other than the Herculean and highly-unlikely-to-accomplish task of changing the party rules about how the presidential candidate is picked, can much influence that end.

The last time the Democrats faced this problem, although it was less serious because they had not yet given up their mostly half-century control of Congress, was after the 1988 election of the first George Bush.

Then, too, a Massachusetts liberal, Michael Dukakis, had been uncompetitive between the two coasts. Democrats needed to move to the political center, and the identity of the new chairman was supposed to be the test of whether that would occur.

They picked the late Ron Brown, a Ted Kennedy protege, signaling, it seemed, the party was just tilting further left.

In fact, Brown’s liberalism had little effect on Democratic fortunes. He kept the party together until 1992, when it nominated Bill Clinton, who capitalized upon an ailing Bush economy with his own moderate politics, to appeal beyond Democratic core constituents.

Of course, whoever wins the chairmanship must keep the party machinery functioning, raise sufficient funds and not do anything stupid when he appears as the titular head of the Democratic Party on television.

If history is any guide, the 2006 elections will give the Democrats hope because the out-party generally picks up seats in Congress during a second-term president’s midterm elections. However, those results, too, depend more on the president’s popularity, or factors in individual states, than the Democratic chair’s efforts.

All of which is not to say that the election of the Democratic chair is meaningless, or that Dean’s election would not be controversial.

Republicans, of course, would hail it as further proof Democrats were continuing their old ways, and the news media would almost certainly ratify that notion. The election of a more centrist candidate might generate the opposite consensus.

Yet none of this is critical to whether the Democrats can take back the White House. They surely can if they nominate the right candidate. But unless the new chairman can change the nominating process so that four years hence it produces a presidential candidate viable in the Sun Belt, Rocky Mountain states and rural parts of the Midwest, this election is much more hype than anything else.

Peter A. Brown is an editorial page columnist for the Orlando Sentinel.