Democrats Set Delegate Selection Rules : Politics: The action is taken early and smoothly. One provision allows California to advance its presidential primary, but the state may not act.

The Democratic National Committee on Saturday approved new delegate selection rules for the 1992 campaign--including a critical provision that would allow California to move up its presidential primary--and party leaders declared themselves ready to take on the Republicans and win back the White House.

“By locking up one of the earliest and certainly the smoothest rules-making process we’ve ever had, we now allow our presidential candidates to focus on their message, not shadowbox over rules,” Michael McCurry, the party’s communications director, said in an interview at the national committee meeting here.

But, even if the formal rules debate--which in the past had often dragged on interminably--is over, the change in the timing of the candidate selection process appears to have injected a new element of uncertainty into the campaign.

Under the rules adopted here, the “window,” or the time alloted for most delegate contests, will start on the first Tuesday in March, instead of the second Tuesday, as in 1988. Party leaders said that the change was made in general to encourage big states to advance the dates of their delegate selection contests in the hope that this would put an earlier end to the often divisive intraparty competition for the nomination.

More specifically, the new rule was designed to accommodate party leaders in California, who have been trying to advance their primary from its traditional June date to an earlier time, which could give the nation’s largest state increased influence on the presidential nominating process.

But it is by no means clear that California will make that change. The effort to advance the primary date has been bogged down in the Legislature in Sacramento, caught in a dispute between those who want to hold one combined primary for presidential candidates and state office seekers in March and those who advocate two primaries--one in March for the presidency, the other in June or September for state candidates.

As a result, advocates of an earlier presidential primary for California are no longer confident that it will become reality, even though the national committee has tried to smooth the path with its rules revision.

“If it doesn’t pass in two weeks, I think it’s dead,” Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., state party chairman, told a reporter at the national committee meeting.

If California fails to take advantage of the opening created by the 1992 rules, other big states might fill the void, McCurry suggested. But the possibility that states will shift the dates of their delegate selection processes adds to the tactical uncertainties facing strategists for potential 1992 Democratic presidential candidates.

Regardless of what the individual states do, the party’s national chairman, Ron Brown, declared that, with the adoption of the 1992 rules, “our internal party work is over and we can get down to the serious business of electing Democrats.”

As evidence of his determination to focus the party on substantive rather than procedural issues, he cited the national committee’s adoption Saturday of a resolution endorsing the proposal by New York Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to cut the Social Security payroll tax.

“It just makes sense for us Democrats to be on the side of cutting taxes for working people,” Brown told national committee members here. The chairman called the Social Security tax “one of the most regressive we have.” And he described Moynihan’s proposal to reduce the tax to keep the Social Security trust fund from being used to reduce the overall federal deficit as “a blow for fairness, a triumph for honesty.”

Staff writer Doug Shuit of the Sacramento Bureau contributed to this story.