“Senator Obama continues to believe in the important role that Iowa and New Hampshire have historically played in the process of choosing our party’s presidential nominee,” campaign spokesman Brad Anderson said.

Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Scott Brennan said the party “should always look for ways to improve the nomination process.

“Senator Obama is committed to ensuring the Iowa Caucus will remain first in 2012,” he added.

The calendar commission will meet in Denver this weekend in advance of next week’s Democratic National Convention.

“The creation of this commission is a clear sellout to Hillary Clinton,” said Nagle, who chaired the Iowa Democratic Party during the 1984 caucuses and served in Congress from 1986 to 1992.

Clinton supporters have been critical of the caucuses, arguing that they are too difficult to attend and that Iowa, where Clinton finished third, has too much influence. Obama won 12 of 13 states which held caucuses.

“I got the email from [Iowa Obama campaign chair] Jackie Norris this morning saying this wasn’t a problem for Iowa and we’d all be fine, but it’s a real threat and it’s really disappointing,” said Nagle. “It’s a real disaster for our state, frankly.

“It operates on the assumption that Barack will be the president,” said Nagle, “and there’s absolutely no guarantee of that whatsoever. ”

Nagle says he is certain that Iowa will lose its first in the nation role if Obama loses. “The only way you might get around that is if the mandate creating the commission restricts them from considering the status of Iowa and New Hampshire. It’s all up to Obama,” said Nagle. “I think if he could get Hillary’s permission, then that could go in. But it’s clear that Obama is perfectly willing to let her control this.”

“The highest governing authority of the Democratic Party is the national convention,” says Nagle. He wants to see the convention reaffirm Iowa’s first in the nation role, which would bind the commission for at least the next four years. “If they don’t mandate that, the commission is really free to do whatever it wants.”

The Dingell commission will have 35 members and there is no guarantee that either Iowa or New Hampshire will be represented.

“We should be making the Obama campaign aware that if he breaks his pledge to Iowa or New Hampshire, it could have serious consequences to his ability to carry this state,” said Nagle. “In Iowa, it’s a threat. In New Hampshire, it’s a reality.”

Update: Brad Anderson, an Iowa Obama spokesperson, disputes Nagle’s view. “Senator Obama’s commitment to Iowa and New Hampshire being first in the nomination process hasn’t changed,” Anderson told Iowa Independent.

Three days before the 2008 caucuses, Obama told the Politico that the calendar should “absolutely” stay the same, with Iowa first, in four years.

Waterloo was the last city of its size connected to the Interstate. In large part that was because the area’s 26-year congressman (1949-74) H.R. Gross was a Republican so conservative that he voted against virtually every bill that spent money. To heck with you, then, said his colleagues, and the pork did not flow to Waterloo.

Dave Nagle, who today is in the headlines for sadder reasons, was the first Democrat to represent Waterloo’s congressional district, then numbered the 3rd, since the New Deal when he won in 1986.Nagle had already made his mark on the national scene as Iowa Democratic Party chair during the 1984 caucuses. It was really the first time the Democratic campaign in Iowa had been front and center in the national press; Jimmy Carter flew under the radar in 1976, and ran a phantom Rose Garden campaign against Ted Kennedy in 1980.  But in 1984 the full media circus came to town, and Nagle was the state party’s face to the nation.

Nagle got really lucky with the map; Iowa’s non-partisan redistricting system had placed heavily Democratic Johnson County in with Waterloo. And that’s how I got mixed up with Dave Nagle in the first place, in my first journalism career in public radio in the early 1990s. Nagle was a great source, who sometimes called me up, himself, out of the blue, leaving me scrambling for tape.

But that map which helped Dave Nagle so much in 1986, and had him running unopposed by 1990, was his undoing in 1992. Iowa hemorrhaged population in the 1980s and lost a seat in the House.  The cold calculations of the map put Nagle together with cartoonish freshman Jim Nussle, who was best known at the time for wearing a paper bag on his head on the House floor.

Despite the retrospective memory that 1992 was a banner Democratic year, it really wasn’t in Iowa, except for Bill Clinton. A fair share of the Ross Perot vote went Republican the rest of the way down the ballot, there were several losses both big and close, and Nagle lost to Nussle by one percent.

Jim Nussle went on to chair the House Budget Committee and help build a record deficit, work he is now continuing in the Bush Administration. Dave Nagle came home to Waterloo.  In his post-Congressional career, Nagle has been the very definition of an