Is January 15th, when we find out how much of what has been raised, is left as cash on hand. This is the key quesiton - cash on hand. Kerry, Clark and Dean are the only three candidates expected to have significant amounts of money available to fight the air war, everyone else is hoping for a "bounce".
Edwards, Lieberman, Kucinich, Sharpton, Mosley-Braun are not going to get bounces.
Gephardt gets one chance - Iowa - for a bounce. And it seems unlikely.
Kerry may get a small bounce after Iowa, but he has no place to go in New Hampshire. Why should he be the unDean? What does he bring to the table. He has not shown himself to be more presidential or restrained.
Clark is the only one left who can get a New Hampshire bounce.
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Here is the question - can Dean survive the ad bombing he is going to get from Kerry, Gephardt and Clark? Collectively they have as much cash on hand as he does, and each one of them must take Dean down to have a chance at the nomination. The smaller players might go after one of the "pack", but they can't significantly slow down even Kerry.
Even Kucinich is targetting Dean.
This is a real test of the new politics that has emerge - is it strong enough to create supporters who will not be swayed by television ads, or who will be drawn back in by other supporters when they waver.
If the answer is yes - then Dean is the nominee. If the answer is no, then he will stumble hard as he is hit from every side for being "unelectable".
The problem is that "unelectable" is the weakest attack on Dean by far - if he is so unelectable, why is he the front runner of a large field? He does not display weakness or cold bloodedness that doomed Dukakis and McGovern, nor an excessive devotion to civility that doomed Gore. And Gore wasn't "unelectable" - he merely wasn't willing to go that last mile to be elected.
The strongest argument against Dean is not how other people see Dean, which is something that is open to vague reinterpretation, but Dean himself . Instead of using a kind of post-modern attack "well other people think he's unelectable", a strong politician would take on Dean squarely. Not for details of his record - as Kucinich has tried to do - but for a pervasive sense that he is not fit to carry the office.
Negative campaigns must strike at the core of people's willingness to accept the candidate. They must create an image which links a canidate with an unacceptable idea: being soft on crime, irreligious, unpatriotic, corrupt or dishonest. It isn't pretty - but then, no negative campaign is. There is no nice way to smear someone's character in a 30 second spot.
But so far the people who are trying to become the unDean have quailed at doing this, and so, look, weaker - they look as if they are hoping to pick a fight with the front runner and at least get some coverage. Which, not paradoxically, undercuts their "unelectable" meme. The "unelectable" meme rests on "Dean is Weak" - that means that to work it has to have "Dean is Weak" factoids. But, the very mad rush to be the unDean says "Dean is Strong". Dean also has plenty of "Dean is Strong" factoids - he's been working on piling them up since late last spring, and creating a sense of revival like "bigness" to his movement.
Bottom line - it makes no sense to pursue a line of attack that rests on the premise that Dean is Strong and that he is Weak as well. The contradiction will mean that the attack will fail to gain any traction, since it can be countered by simple streams of factoids: Dean is ahead in national polls, has raised the most money, has the most volunteers and is first in the most early states.
To make Dean look weak must rest on an attack against his basic stance: George Bush is all wrong and a complete disaster - and we don't have to do much to fix things. This is the basic Dean contradiction - he's a radical who doesn't want to do that much, he is a candidate of desparate people who believe that the situation isn't all that desparate. This is not a weakness that "unelectable" touches, instead, it plays directly at Dean himself, and his positions. Once the issue is off the campaigns - because Dean has, by far and away, the best campaign - and on individuals, the story lines are possible for a single strong candidate to emerge as a grassroots choice against Dean.
Problem, if every Democratic candidate but Dean is conducting a carbon copy campaign, how can any of them break from the pack?
Answer: they can't.