Maybe I'm not getting an accurate picture of what is happening, but I'm amazed by this sudden rush of people away from Dean. Whay are people so set on changing who they support? There are only three reasons in my opion to have "A Candidate":
- You want to give money, so you have to decide who to give it to,
- You want to work on a campaign to over throw Bush so you have to decide who to help,
- You're about to vote.
Other than that it doesn't seem to matter who you support (other than to answer polls and calls from campaigns about hard counts) until you vote. You can go to mutliple meet ups even. If you're not voting you have the luxury of being able to listen and gather more information than the poor sop who had to vote before they had the full picture (or at least fuller picture).
If people leave Dean because he did poorly in IA or because he gave an annoying speach afterwards never really supported Howard Dean or they are band wagonners (possibly why they supported Dean in the first place). This is to say they didn't really have "A Candidate" and probably should have realised they didn't need to have one.
I nominally support Dean and I think it's good he isn't running away with this. He clearly needs more practice campaigning than he was going to get if he had a cake walk. If we have someone other than Dean they will probably be a better candidate (in terms of an election) than an untested Dean (not actually untested, but not as tested as I would like).
A seperate, but additional note on IA: I am happy IA slapped people who were going negative (Gep and Dean) and endorsed someone for running a positive campaign (Edwards). I didn't put Kerry on either side, because while he didn't have TV ads attacking anyone, he has had them in NH (earlier in the Fall, I think), he reportedly sent out mailings that were not in the spirit of not attacking and his comments about Edwards not being born when Kerry was in Vietman seemed over the top, so I can't say I'm think he has run a positive campaign like Edwards.