As an enthusiastic Deanocrat, I have a question for people supporting Clark, or any other candidate for reasons of 'electability.' Since Dean has obviously done far better than any other candidate in the primary campaign, coming from nowhere to the cusp of walking away with the whole thing a few months early, doesn't that say something good about Dean's own electability, at least as compared to the other candidates?
To me, the primaries are sort of a trial run when we Democrats get some indication of who the best candidate is, and we choose that person to take our message to the country. On that score, if some candidate doesn't succeed in the primaries, he certainly won't succeed later on, so we wisely reject him.
Arguments of the kind, "if only those dumb partisans could pick candidate x in the primaries, then they'd win," seem to me to misunderstand the basic logic of primaries. We're all Democrats, so the primaries are a chance for Democrats to talk to the people who are most likely to support them. If those people don't get behind candidate x, then the less-likely-to-support-candidate-x general electorate certainly won't.
Don't we by definition want to pick the general election candidate who does best in the primaries? Please, prove me wrong.