First diary entry appears reprinted wholesale from
my weblog. Hope to produce some actual original content in the future, but this might become the norm.
Watchin' the democratic primary candidates' debate, with friends and some of the other UO Dean people. Thoughts:
First, on Dean. There seemed to be some disapointment about the way he's laying back, not being as angry. It's true, and it's because Dean is heavily into front-runner mode at this point. He's got three or four issues (health care, education, the war in iraq) that he can "safely" be angry about. I say safely not because they aren't controversial issues, but because so far they've resonated well with voters. Those are the issues that made him the front runner, and I'm sure he's content to keep hitting them until someone makes him change.
Which is the problem facing the rest of the field: at this point, they're all playing catch-up, running left to try to get some of that base away from Dean. Let's talk about them for a minute.
First, Sharpton, Mosley-Braun, and Kucinich. I'm writing them off as throwaway, or protest, candidacies. I like some of the things they say, but their levels of support and fundraising just aren't up where the front-runners are. I think the latter two should stay in Congress, where their perspective makes them most effective. For the record, I think Sharpton should run as well; he's an excellent speaker, and that ability would serve him well in the Senate.
Gephardt is polling well at the moment, at least in primary states (national polls are kinda meaningless at this point, I think; name recognition plays far too large a roll, and Sharpton's performances at the Dem debates inflate his percentage artificially), but he's in trouble. Unions are considering supporting Dean far too seriously; if Gephardt loses their support, and maybe even if they come out for him too late, he's sunk. He has to do well in Iowa (if he's not at least second place in NH, he'll probably need to win Iowa), or he's done.
The most intriguing development so far in the race has been the Clark campaign. The conventional wisdom was that Clark would be able to suck votes from Dean. The idea was that Dean was attracting a lot of people who respected him for being loud and in-your-face; maybe more than would actually vote for him. Clark was supposed to be able to win over a lot of those straight-talk people, call them the McCain vote, who might have been persuaded that Dean was too far left for them. Clark's shooting that image in the foot, though, by being so evasive in the debates. If Clark was trying to be a straight-talker, he's failing abysmally (to rearrange sponge's favorite Gephardt-ism) at it. What he's got to learn is that the McCain vote isn't particularly concened with the content; they'll vote for most anybody who they think will follow through with the promises they make, even if they're all off-the-deep-end insane.
I'm going to surprise myself here and say that of the non-Dean candidates, I like Lieberman the best. I don't think he's got much of a chance, though; he's a ways of the lead in all the early primaries, and his national and state poll numbers are in free-fall.
Which leaves us with the Johns. I think Kerry is going to croak early, victim of his own inability to excite anybody about anything. I don't think he'd make a bad President, really, but you can't win a national election in the United States anymore unless you have the ability to essentially raise a lynch mob from the bully pulpit. Kerry flatness was brought up by one of the moderators in the debate tonight, and he responded with "wait until the new 'Kerry Gone Wild' video comes out." That's a really good line, but even though it made me laugh, Kerry delivered it will all the flair of a doctor diagnosing a patient with cancer. The man is terminally humorless; he comes across like he's asking you to give your vote to a corpse.
Edwards is the exact opposite. He's entertaining to watch, even if what he's saying makes no sense whatsoever. That's why he'll be the candidate that's left running against Dean when Super Tuesday rolls around.
Someone raised the point today that Edwards doesn't have a lot of money raised, but I don't think that's really all that big an issue. Reasoning is this: Dean's getting roughly three quarters of his campaign funding through the small, seventy-five dollar type of donations that he's always harping on. That means that, with Kerry not bringing much of his personal fortune into play yet, that most of the traditional campaign contributions are divided among three or four candidates (Kerry, Clark, Gephardt, Edwards.) Some of that money is candidate exclusive, and will be out of play once that candidate is knocked out. But most of it is pretty general, I'd assume; whether it's anti-Bush money, or money designed purely to prevent the election of a guy (Dean) who'll have no reason to put the CEOs of major companies on his rolodex if he ever gets into the White House. That money is going to consolidate behind whatever candidate winds up against Dean; I think it'll be Edwards, which is why his current fundraising woes aren't that big a deal.
Predicition: Dean wins in NH, Edwards takes South Carolina, and Gephardt wins very narrowly in Iowa. Kerry drops out at this point; Gephardt will hang around for a while, depending on how decisive his victory in Iowa is. If major unions (AFSCME, SEIU) endorse Dean, though, Iowa goes for his way and the race turns into Dean-Edwards right there.
Clark and Lieberman are both X-factors, at this point. I don't see either one of them doing well in any of the early primaries; to have a shot at the nomination, they'd have to "break late" and win the Missouri or Arizona primaries (Washington is 'Dean country,' as they say.) I haven't seen poll numbers for the non-binding Delaware primary that's at the end of January, but winning that would presumably provide a boost as well.
Looking farther ahead, and assuming the race is indeed Dean/Edwards by 'Super-Tuesday' time, the schedule favors Dean. California, the northeast, and New York (where Dean should do well against the southern Edwards) are all a week before Florida, Texas, and most of the rest of the south (where Edwards, presumably, will outperform Dean.)