The story's been told before, but with California's primary election a couple of weeks away, voters should be reminded how they have been manipulated by the state's politicians for no good reason.

For many decades, California held its primary election in June, a reasonable date that gave voters and candidates about the right amount of time for campaigning, both prior to the primary and afterward.

As primaries became the dominant venue for presidential politics in the 1970s and 1980s, however, and as more states advanced their primaries to gain exposure and clout, California's politicians - especially its Democrats - felt left out.

Publicly, they complained about California becoming a "political ATM" in which presidential candidates raised money but otherwise ignored the state's interests as they concentrated on earlier primary states. Mostly, however, California's politicians simply resented not being courted by presidential hopefuls.

The solution proposed for this monumental crisis - one that ordinary Californians couldn't discern - was to advance California's primary, thus ensuring, or so we were told, that California wouldn't be ignored by those seeking the White House.

The past decade has seen much fiddling with California's primary date and a half-decade ago, it was decreed that the state's voters would have their say on the first Tuesday in March. Initially, the legislation was to apply only to presidential primaries every four years but when the bill got to the state Assembly, its political schemers quietly changed nonpresidential primaries to March as well.

Why the change, one made with almost no public notice? Democrats knew that a new round of redrawing legislative and congressional districts was coming after the 2000 census, and at the time, they had plans to squeeze maximum partisan advantage from the process. But a partisan gerrymander could be challenged by Republicans in a referendum, subjecting it to a popular vote in 2002. By shifting the 2002 nonpresidential primary forward to March, Democrats created a conscious conflict in state law that they hoped would block Republicans from using the referendum.

The scenario that Democrats created never came to pass. For a variety of complex political reasons, the much-anticipated confrontation was averted by a two-party deal on congressional and legislative districts. Nevertheless, California was stuck with its March primary in 2002, forcing candidates for statewide, legislative and congressional offices to declare themselves far earlier than good sense would dictate and in other ways disrupting the normal flow of political business.

The March 2002 primary was such an embarrassing affair - with abysmal voter turnout, among other things - that the Legislature toyed with doing away with it, at least in nonpresidential years. One version would have created two primaries in presidential years, one in March for those seeking the White House and another later in the year for everything else. But nothing happened.

We know now that California politicians' hopes of becoming presidential kingmakers also are an abysmal failure. Smaller states simply have "front-loaded" their primaries to push themselves ahead of California, and with his string of early victories this year, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry has all but cinched the Democratic nomination.

The net effect is that except for a couple of controversial ballot measures, the March primary is shaping up as another dud. Voter turnout is likely to be extremely low, the growing number of independent voters will be frozen out of the process again (because the two major parties killed an open primary system after one election), and we'll have gone through all of this for nothing.

California politicians should admit that their hopes of achieving presidential clout are just pipe dreams. Outside of California, no one wants the state to play a role in choosing nominees; we are the 800-pound gorilla that no one wants to let out of its cage. Among other things, the candidates don't want to raise and spend the millions of dollars it would take to campaign here.

The only rational course, therefore, would be to junk the March primary and shift it to June, where it belongs.